How to achieve Human Factors Integration…

Why is integration so important?

Human Factors professionals often talk about “human factors integration” and how integration, if done well, can ensure project success in terms of usability and operational acceptance.

Human factors integration helps to ensure that human factors methods and principles are applied appropriately and consistently during systems development in order to achieve a safe and effective design for end users (Elder et al, 2001). At a practical level, we need to consider how this can be achieved.

There is no single way of achieving human factors integration; the specific method will depend upon the nature of the project and its intended outcome. However there are some basic principles that can be applied and this is what we intend to provide here as well as a couple of examples where this approach has been successful.

If you have any questions regarding human factors integration, please contact us via the RSSB enquiries desk.

Guidelines

Agree responsibility for human factors integration

In the same way that the entire industry has a responsibility toward safety, so any project has a responsibility to ensure that the human factors issues are identified, managed and integrated with the project outputs. It is not acceptable for a human factors specialist to be involved as a “tick box exercise” – they need to be empowered to do the human factors work that is required (within the project boundary of course). Similarly the human factors specialist has a responsibility to inform the project of the human factors requirements and how integration can be achieved.

Produce a Project Integration Plan

The use of Human Factors Integration Plans (HFIP) has often been seen as the way to enable HF Integration. However, these only work if all disciplines buy into the HFIP and the HFIP correctly identifies the working practices of other disciplines. It seems more logical for a Project Integration Plan to be developed by the Project Management team.

The project integration plan should, as a minimum, identify the disciplines involved, the work that they will have to do, the deliverables of that work, and how the deliverables will be integrated to achieve the overall project aim. It should also provide a method for managing conflicting requirements or findings of different disciplines and how a compromise or the best solution will be achieved.

In this way, the human factors specialist, and all other disciplines, will have to state the work that they will do and then jointly identify a way to integrate their findings.

Involve Human Factors Specialists from the beginning

Human Factors specialists should be involved from the project inception stage, and throughout the entire project. A common fault in many projects is sporadic involvement of human factors, rather than involvement throughout the project. For example, poor involvement could occur where human factors is only involved:

At the beginning to tell the team what they should be doing
Mid-way to carry out a quick review and see if everything is ok
In the latter stages when there is inadequate time to identify and manage the human issues or it is too late to influence change.

In all of these cases, the project will obtain human factors advice but they may be unable to apply it correctly or identify human factors issues as the project develops. Late involvement means that the specialist has no knowledge of the project history so their advice may not be directly relevant.

The worst case scenario is obtaining human factors input at the very end of the project, when the system or outputs are in use and change is very costly and difficult to achieve.

Involvement throughout the project does not necessarily have to mean a full time team as this depends upon the project requirements; nor does it have to mean huge costs as the resource requirement can be discussed and appropriate input agreed.

Involvement at the project inception will enable the human factors specialist to come to an agreement with the project as to the workstreams that are required, when they are required as part of the overall programme, costs and deliverables and how integration can be achieved.

Involvement throughout the project will enable the human factors issues to be identified as they arise and managed effectively, as well as have a drip feed of knowledge as empirical research is completed. The disciplines can also share knowledge and decision making – and avoid naļve decisions being made at a later date. If human factors issues are identified and managed throughout they will have minimal impact on the final product; if all have to be identified at one or two stages there is a risk that something will be missed or it will be too late to make the changes that are needed; both of these situations have undesirable performance and cost implications for the industry.

"Well it depends…we need to do some research"

Two areas of human factors work that are often not given enough time on projects are empirical research and testing with end users. There is a lot of human factors knowledge available, however projects need to accept that research and, in many cases, testing are an inevitable part of human factors work.

The application of existing human factors knowledge has to take into account the context in which it is being applied. It is also likely that further questions will be raised which will require further investigation – human factors is a science and research is a necessary part of it. Similarly, findings and products need to be tested with end users to ensure that the final product achieves the performance and cost benefits required by the industry and does not import any risk.

Provide a common method for recording multi-discipline requirements

It is often the case that human factors outputs can end up as technical reports, whose content is provided to other disciplines for application to the final product. The human factors specialist has a responsibility to ensure that their reports can be understood by non HF specialists. Nevertheless, there is still the potential for misinterpretation of the human factors findings to occur and their benefit is, essentially, lost in translation.

Our experience on systems development projects (in particular ERTMS and Adhesion Management System) shows that Requirements Management is an excellent way of enabling integration, i.e. each discipline can work in their own way, under the common agreement that the output of their work has to be a set of requirements. These requirements are:

Stored in a Requirements Management database (rather than individual reports),
Overseen by a Requirements Engineer
Managed according to a defined Requirements Management Process, which includes an audit trail and method for managing conflicting requirements.

The output of the project is a coherent set of requirements, containing the requirements of all disciplines, which can be applied by the intended user, e.g. system developer.

This approach has been used successfully by the team on the ERTMS and Adhesion Management System projects. It has provided visibility of human factors outputs to the other disciplines and provided a vehicle for discussing and resolving conflicts and identifying gaps.