Safety Plan

The safety plan is the central governance document for a safety-related development, required by the project-dependent safety management clause of ISO 26262-2. It defines and schedules all safety activities across the lifecycle: the work products to be produced, who is responsible for each, the roles and independence of the safety organization, confirmation measures, tailoring decisions with their rationale, and how safety-relevant changes will be managed. In practice it is the first document a customer or assessor asks for, because it shows whether safety is actually planned and governed or merely intended - and every later audit traces evidence back to what the plan committed to.

The core sections are: scope and normative basis; the planned safety activities and their schedule with phase gates and milestones; the full list of work products with responsibilities; the safety organization with roles, independence requirements, and competency evidence; tailoring decisions with documented justification; the change management process with impact analysis triggers; and the confirmation measures. The course structures this as a template with mandatory and recommended sections, and covers the document hierarchy - how the safety plan references the project plan and quality plans without duplicating them.

Tailoring means adapting or omitting requirements of the standard for your product context - and it is only compliant when each tailoring decision is documented with a justification. Legitimate grounds include the ASIL of the safety goals, the development category (new versus modified item), and requirements genuinely not applicable to the product. The course teaches the justification criteria that customers, certification bodies, and auditors actually apply; in its case study, twelve ISO 26262-4 requirements are tailored for an ASIL D brake control module with justifications that were accepted at assessment.

Treat the plan as a living document under change control, not a kickoff artifact. That means keeping the activity schedule synchronized with project reality, recording safety-relevant changes with their impact analysis, tracking work-product status continuously, and maintaining the evidence package - competency records, review records, confirmation measure results - in a structure an auditor can navigate. The course includes an evidence checklist, the most common audit findings against safety plans, and a gap remediation approach, drawn from a case study plan that passed its TUV assessment on first submission.

Nine chapters covering plan structure, lifecycle phase mapping, scheduling, roles and responsibilities, tailoring, change management, and audit readiness, supported by 6 interactive tools including a Gantt builder, RACI matrix generator, and tailoring decision tree. The case study walks a complete safety plan for an ASIL D brake control module from concept to production release. A free account starts you off, and the Pro and Expert plans unlock more of the library.