Designing new teams with Cognitive Work Analysis

The expectation in designing new systems, such as military aircraft, is that the new system will offer better ways of working than existing ones. Typically, however, the design effort is heavily biased towards the engineering of the technical component, and little attention is given to the design of the work structure and work processes that are critical for ensuring that the functions and purposes of the new system are properly fulfilled. Consequently, although a system design may look attractive on paper, the potential offered by the new technology may be negated in practice. To avoid this state of affairs, a systematic and pre-emptive analysis of the new ways of working with a new technology is essential (Rasmussen, 1991). Our focus in this paper is the design of team work for complex new systems. Where a system is populated with several workers who must collaborate and coordinate their activities to achieve system goals, a number of issues emerge regarding the team design that will best carry out the work of the system. Some of the relevant issues include: (1) team size, (2) team structure (eg levels of hierarchy, number of subteams), (3) dedicated roles vs multiskilled workers, and (4) spatial arrangement. In the following sections, we will discuss why conventional techniques for analysing work requirements are unsuitable for addressing these kinds of issues. We will describe a new approach that we have developed for designing teams, which is based on Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA; Rasmussen, Pejtersen & Goodstein, 1994; Vicente, 1999), and we will show how we have applied this technique to design teams for a new military aircraft called Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C). To conclude, we will examine the strengths and limitations of this approach based on our experience with AEW&C, and briefly discuss key directions for further research.