The cost of inadequate human factors integration

Effective human factors input is crucial to system effectiveness and project success, but many projects are still not benefiting:

• Costly failures are arising from inability of systems to meet the needs of users.
• Support, training and maintenance costs are high.
• Design is overly focused on technical artefacts to the exclusion of human and organisational factors, thus the majority of risks are under-addressed.
• Where human factors is addressed, requirements are often not mapped properly into the overall design – thus the goals of the system are not met.
• The level of human factors input is inappropriate – either 'too little, too late', or carried out in too much detail in the wrong areas.
• If human factors risks are not considered the technical system components may be over engineered at additional cost to achieve a specified target level of safety.

Missing the point – how the human contribution is under-estimated. The effort expended on different causes of accidents, and their actual importance.

How are you dealing with these issues?

• Legislation, litigation, standards and guidelines have developed towards a more objective position in addressing risk.
• The ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable) and TLS (target level of safety) philosophies are imposing increasingly quantifiable safety standards for systems to meet.
• Human-factors-related events (as opposed to technology-related failures) are by far the most significant factor influencing system safety.
• Hazard identification, risk identification and risk mitigation therefore depend upon human factors input to mitigate risk effectively, enabling a tolerable level of safety to be attained.

Our approach

Praxis High Integrity Systems has significant experience of analysis and pragmatic application of human factors and safety in high-integrity systems. We use systematic methods based upon sound theoretical principles for the elicitation, specification and management of human factors safety requirements in high-integrity systems.

We appreciate the importance of fully considering the rich spectrum of human factors issues that affect the safety of operational systems in their context of use. If human factors risks are not considered a system may not achieve the required level of integrity. Conversely, if human factors mitigations are not considered, the system components may be unnecessarily over-engineered at additional cost to achieve a specified target level of safety.

The whole system's context of use is considered during human factors and system safety analyses using appropriate techniques. This promotes solutions that fully exploit human capabilities and address their limitations. Benefits include:

• Enhanced safety
• Reduced human error rates
• Improved in-service performance
• Reduced lifecycle costs

Nugatory human factors analyses are eliminated. The Praxis High Integrity Systems approach provides a mechanism for ensuring that human factors and safety issues are properly addressed in terms of:

• Hazard identification
• Risk identification and
• Risk mitigation

concerning:

• People
• Procedures and
• Equipment

within the levels of:

• Sub-system
• Core system
• Service-level and
• Operational environment

The four levels that Praxis High Integrity Systems addresses to ensure that human factors is considered effectively.

Domains are considered in a complete but selective manner appropriate to system risk significance. Scope of work is minimised, client costs and schedule impacts are reduced, and resulting systems can be demonstrated to have achieved a tolerable level of safety.



How we work with you

Competency
Praxis High Integrity Systems employs top class individuals that bring a wide variety and depth of human factors and safety related experience to the group, including qualified ergonomists and leading experts in usability, situation awareness, human error and human reliability assessment. The Company possesses a strong combination of human factors engineering and safety expertise.

Transferring the capability to our clients
Praxis High Integrity Systems also offers a one-day training seminar, 'Value-Added Human Factors Engineering', providing senior systems engineers and project managers with valuable advice on how to gain maximum value from targeted HF analyses integrated into the systems development lifecycle.

To find out more about how Praxis High Integrity Systems can support your human factors requirements, please contact us.