Checklist of human factors activities?

The following checklist can be used as a basic guide to project managers and engineers considering how to include human factors in their projects.  It is not necessary exhaustive, but provides a set of sensible activities and considerations that apply to most projects.  For further guidance on how to apply human factors to your projects, please contact us.

• Assign a person competent to manage human factors (HF) within the project or programme.
• Assign HF the same importance as any other part of the project (e.g. safety, ILS).
• Ensure all staff carrying out HF work are competent to do so, including contractors and sub-contractors.
• Ensure that those carrying out HF work have sufficient resources and authority.
• Ensure that HF responsibility within the supply chain is clearly defined all all parties understand their responsibilities.
• Ensure lines of communication to and from HF staff are clear and effective.
• A plan for all human factors work exists, is actively used and is integrated with overall project plans.
• Appropriate HF standards are identified and followed.
• Adequate access to affected personnel in order to capture requirements and views is provided.
• HF work is properly coordinated with the rest of the project or programme, and with other affected organisations or projects.
• Ensure existing and required end user competency is assessed.
• Capture an understanding of the end user in a stakeholder profile or similar.
• User / human factors requirements are well defined, validated and integrated with other system requirements.
• Conduct job and task analysis to understand and baseline existing activity.
• Identify, model and control human error potential.
• Ensure factors contributing to very high or very low workload are identified, modelled and controlled.
• Appropriate human reliability techniques are applied correctly.
• Dependencies between human actions are fully understood.
• Project seeks to design system to help user avoid or recover from errors.
• Physical controls, indicators and displays are designed around ergonomics principles / standards.
• Human machine interface has been designed and tested in accordance with usability principles / standards.