The Importance of Getting Specialist Advice Early

In the development of a system (or product, process, service..) getting relevant specialist advice early on in a project will help to get a better system, and avoid potentially expensive—in terms of money and time—rework.

The image below is a rough visualisation of the “hill climbing problem”. Imagine the wiggly line as being a range of hills on the horizon. The horizon represents the problem space for your system. Each hill is a potential solution; a different way of meeting the requirement or need. Different hills have different properties and advantages, but generally you want to be as high as you can be. Or at least as high as your requirement and contract demands.

Systems can be complex beasts and require input from a variety of disciplines. Without support from appropriate specialists the project team may be picking the wrong hill to climb. Your new software application, command and control system, service, gadget or gizmo will likely benefit from, or need, input from a variety of experts. Does the system need to be safe? Does it need to conform to particular legislation? Will the human component of the system have an impact on its performance? Does it need a long battery life? Will it need to be maintained? What is the potential logistical impact? Without appropriate input the team may not know that other hills even exist, let alone that they need to be aiming for a different one (i.e. their product may not be designed with certain safety legislation in mind).

Design decisions represent selecting a hill in the hill climbing metaphor. Once a hill has been selected effort is expended to scale the slope of the hill; meetings, decisions, analysis, design work, prototyping, and so on. Money, time, reputation, and careers can be invested in the chosen design.

Unfortunately, the team might be scaling the wrong hill, or at least not the best hill. If a team isn’t aware of all of the factors—all of the requirements and considerations—that will have an influence on the design they are making, then they are making uninformed decisions. If relevant experts are involved early on, in the design or ideally the concept phase, then the team will have a better understanding of what hills they should be aiming for; they will be making more informed decisions. This reduces risk and will contribute to a better design, more or less for free compared to the costs of having to rework a design.

The alternative, and is a situation often faced in the case of Human Factors, looks like the diagram below. When a team discovers they have a problem (i.e. problems with legislation, discovering that the workload is too high for the number of operators, etc), or there is a need for improvement it may be too late to implement transformational change. In this situation the team has been making great progress towards a local maximum. They’re doing great things, but they’re not going to go get to the top of a really big hill because the hill they’re climbing (the solution they’re building) isn’t the best hill, or might not get them as high as they need to be.

Faced with this situation a Human Factors practitioner (or Safety Specialist, etc) has two options in providing support to the project; helping the team get to the top of their local maximum, or shifting them to a better hill. In many cases it isn’t realistic to get a change of hill. Time, cost, effort, careers, and reputations may have been heavily invested in the current approach. Aside from the effort to get the system to its current state there will be a wealth of documentation and design decisions behind it, hard fought negotiations and compromises, and a great deal of work to establish a common understanding of the current design amongst the team members and stakeholders. On top of these issues there are reputational and career issues to consider. For example, if there is a lot invested in a project it may prove unlikely that senior figures (or the organisation as a whole) will admit that mistakes have been made and there needs to be a change of direction. In an ideal world this will not be the case, but realistically while transformational change may be desirable and achievable in terms of resources it may not be a pragmatic option to pursue. The appetite and capacity for change may simply not be present.

Getting specialist advice early on in a project, before design decisions have been made, can help to direct a project and result in a better solution whilst avoiding the need for expensive rework or adaptation. It also makes better use of specialist staff; they’ll be influencing the design based on fundamental considerations that improve the system, rather than coming up with patches and fixes.