Review of HFI within and outside MOD

What is this report about?

This report summarises the results of interviews with personnel responsible for HFI within MoD Integrated Project Teams (IPT 's) and civil organisations. The purpose of the interviews was to identify barriers to the application of Human Factors Integration (HFI). It contains initial recommendations for improvements to the HFI process itself and for further work to increase the effectiveness of its application.

What problem does the report address?

The aim of this work was to draw out the issues, difficulties and successful strategies employed by people with responsibility for HFI.

What is the benefit of this work?

This work will direct the future research conducted by the HFI DTC to specifically target those barriers to HFI that have prevented the full and successful application of HFI within MoD (and civil) programmes. Engagement with civil organisations will assist in the objective of ‘spin-in/spin-out' between MoD and commercial organisations.

Who should take note of it?

DPA IPT personnel (particularly HFI Foci)
MoD Industry Group and similar Human Factors (HF) committees
HF practitioners
Service Principal Personnel Officers

What is the report's status?

This is one of four reports under the banner of a Work Package to identify barriers with the current HFI process. The other allied reports investigated the issue of barriers to HFI derived through a literature review and a workshop discussion with MoD and industrial stakeholders. The final report summarises all barriers to HFI and recommended prioritised areas of research that should be conducted to address the problems identified in the earlier reports.

What are the main issues addressed in the report?

The types of problems related to the application of the HFI process fall into the following topic areas:

Budgeting and scheduling
Lack of standardisation in the HFI process
Problems of integrating HFI with Systems Engineering
Qualification and training for HFI
Perceived validity of Human Factors
The Procuring organisations requirements for HFI (and ‘buy-in')
Endorsement of HFI by senior management
Human Factors standards
Re-use of information
Tools and methods to support HFI
Early identification and targeting of projects (requiring HFI)
HFI lessons learned

What are the findings?

The results of the analysis indicate the need for a tailorable and flexible HFI process, that can be used by all service and tri-service procurements. To be useful and to ensure adoption any such HFI process must be well publicised and have backing from senior ranks and the procuring organisation who should require suppliers/ IPTs to comply with it. One of the problems for organisations is that many people with responsibility for HFI will not have any formal training in HF or much experience in HFI.

HF deliverables and data are often recreated for each new project, with an obvious lack of re-use. Projects requiring HFI sometimes go unidentified at their inception resulting in little or no consideration of HFI in subsequent development. HFI also suffers from poor perceptions regarding its validity as a branch of engineering and is made worse by a lack of obtainable evidence from case histories and lessons learned.

What is recommended?

It is recommended that the following be addressed:

Creation of a modular training course on HFI aimed at project managers and people who may have an HFI role.
Production of a standard process that can be used by all branches of the armed forces. The following recommendations apply;
- Encourage HF deliverables, schedules and budgets to be integrated with other project documentation.
- Ensure that suitably qualified personnel are appointed to perform the HF role and be responsible for the HFI process.
- Encourage/mandate the adoption of Early HF Analysis.
- Cover the generation and/or validation of user, system and sub-system level requirements using HF tools and methods.
- Encourage the production of short, readable and succinct HF deliverables.
- Accommodate synergies/crossovers with other groups/disciplines such as training and safety.
- Ensure that the procuring the organisation requires suppliers and IPTs to prove their approach to HFI.
- Investigations of past projects to establish lessons learned and provide evidence for the cost and other implications of neglecting HFI.
- Investigate existing capabilities within the MOD/DPA/DSTL to provide HFI and HF support to IPTs and if necessary prepare a business case for setting up a HF group to provide such support.

So what?
This work should help direct future research to directly address the problems encountered within MoD and Industry in ensuring that HFI gets addressed.

Why bother?
The lack of HFI in the lifecycle can contribute to system inefficiency or failure and there are many real life, high-profile examples where this has happened. Getting HFI right is essential to the development of safe, productive systems for which the appropriate levels of manpower are available to operate. The results of this analysis take account of difficulties addressed in both the civil and MoD domains and the recommendations, where implemented, should serve to fulfil the requirements of both MoD and industry.