Karen Clarke
John Dobson
Ian Somerville
Peter Wright
Angie Miguel

• This TA is concerned with developing a method of process assessment in sociotechnical systems with the aim of discovering vulnerable areas of these processes in order to produce a method of identifying potential failure points at the design stage of a system

• The PERE methodology as a general approach to analysing process vulnerabilities which was developed in the context of REAIMS and builds on work by Reason, Rasmussen and others.
• Work at Newcastle carried out over some years by John Dobson which has developed a method for analysing weaknesses in responsibility and communication structures within and between organisations. This method fits nicely into and complements the PERE methodological framework.
• initial plan was to ‘simply’ integrate these approaches in order to form a systematic method for analysing process vulnerabilities in sociotechnical systems

• Mechanistic - process modelling
• Human Factors - question-based
• Improving Knife to Skin Time
• Chasing Empties
• Problems of ‘component parts’
• Group vs Individual activities

CHLOE has been designed by Angie Miguel as a technique to help identify possible failures in collaborative work both between people and/or people and information systems. The CHLOE method consists of four stages:
• Scenario Description
• Task Identification
• Error Analysis
• Design Suggestions

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CHLOE technique has now been evaluated using existing fieldwork material from the hospitalbased studies workarounds, bed management etc

Conflicting Interests and Wobbly Legs
• Scenario One: Orientation to financial targets
• Agents : Directorate Manager, Management Information
System (MIS), Data Management Section, Ward Manager,
Finance Director ….
• Essential Tasks: identify appropriate patients, assess resources, pre-op assessments, timely billing.
• Problems of goal decomposition.

• Perception Question : Is the necessary information to carry out their tasks available to each participant in a way that is immediately obvious and meaningful to them?
• Goals Question: Is each participant able to see a fully up to date version of (the state of) the system?
• Planning Question : Is extensive coordination and planning required
‘on the spot’ by several participants in order to successfully carry out the task without conflicts or are actions pre-planned and practiced?
• Actions Question: If this action is left incomplete/incorrect, will it prevent the completion of other actions and/or cause the whole task to fail (directly or indirectly)?

Design Suggestions:
– 1.
Laptops for managers who carry out multi-site working such that they could access e-mail, MIS etc.
– 2.
Upgraded phone system to ease inter-site communications
– 3.
Although MIS data could never be fully accurate and up to date it should be possible to improve on the current situation.

• Problems of using existing ethnographic data
• There are general problems with the questions in that most are very complicated and can be interpreted in a range of ways
• The answers to a lot of questions, even ignoring the problems in the questions themselves, are of the ‘sometimes’, ‘maybe’, ‘how would I know’ order
• Tendency to look for an ideal ‘how things ought to be’ world, rather than dealing with ‘how things are’ and obsession in computing with up to date and accurate information
• Rewrite the questions and/or change to prompts?
• Responsibility theme