The process safety team helps guides our efforts based on the current best practices of process safety and leverages MKOPSC’s expansive connection with Industry.

We are uniquely equipped to address issues associated with high-risk industrial work by leveraging resources from the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center and the Ergonomics Center to tackle difficult problems in unique ways.

The human factors team focuses on how procedures can help operators complete their work safely and efficiently by taking into consideration the user, task, and environment.

The Next Generation Advanced Procedures (NGAP) initiative was started in 2013. This initiative takes a systems approach to comprehensively identify the interdependence of external and internal organizational factors which influence how industry can reduce the number of incidents that relate to procedural issues (COS, 2018). Furthermore, we use this same approach to determine the elements of procedural systems that are most closely related to effective human performance in high-risk complex sociotechnical systems.

Toward this end, we use a multi-disciplinary, multi-methodological approach to better understand attributes of the:

• Tasks workers are performing
• States, motivations, and information processing needed from the workers performing the tasks
• Relevant attributes of the context in which the workers are performing the task (e.g. the physical environment, psychosocial context, and tools available)
• Interactions between the tasks, workers, and context that may impact workers’ ability to successfully engage in interactive behavior

 

Research Projects

 

The Next Generation Advanced Procedures Initiative has several ongoing projects designed to identify important elements of effective procedural systems, which include:

• Writer’s guide
• Complexity matrix
• Variables predictive of differing procedural interactions
• Performance measurement with procedures
• Machine learning to develop procedure guidelines
• Counterfactual training and procedural performance
• Relationship between safety culture and procedural management systems

 

However, the method for developing and maintaining all of the necessary elements of an effective procedure system are not completely understood. This may account for the number of incidents associated with procedural problems.