Chapter 13: The Changing nature of Task analysis

1)A need to know

 Purpose of Task analysis: How something is done or should be done, to ensure that the intended
outcomes are achieved
Examples: how to organize work, manage people etc
 Three things which proved vital/need to do task analysis
New technologies and new requirements due to changing demands stopped us from
experimenting/incremental adaptation
Tasks became intricate due to developments in society
Less time to adapt to changes

to determine who should do what, why it was necessary, and finally how and when it should be done.

1.1 Task analysis and planning

 Plans provide the structure of behavior. If not, the control will be lost.
 Scrambled Control Modes: In these situations, operators may struggle to apply established
procedures or control strategies because the situation doesn't match their mental models or
training.
 Opportunistic Control Modes: In these situations, operators may adapt to the specific
circumstances and take actions that are not part of standard procedures but are perceived as
beneficial.
 Difference between plans and task analysis:
Plans: rough sketch, structure of behavior but not “elaborate blueprints for every moment of the
day”, mostly for ourselves, less for others
Task description: for others, represents best understanding of how something can be done.

2) Why is task analysis needed?

 When the physical and mental resources needed exceeds a single man capacity for a single task,
task analysis can be used to break down the composite activity to a few simpler activities. Task
analysis proposes way to combine and schedule the activities of many to produce an overall
whole
 When the task is so long, and becomes complicated and it cannot be interrupted, and the
technology can function independently. Task analysis can be used to describe the situation
where not everyone can use the equipment directly as designed
 When s, being in control of the technology becomes a task in itself, as a means to carry out the
original task, task analysis can be used to understand the impact of the technology on the overall
ability to carry out the task.

2.1 The changing nature of work

 The role of the human relative to technology changed from tracking, over regulating and
monitoring to finally targeting
 People could no longer work at the own pace instead to work at the pace set by others/set
by the machine
 2.2 The first push: Productivity

Frederick W. Taylor at the Midvale steel company

His observation of repetitive tasks slowing down the workers and the work, lead to the
formulation of scientific management principle. He considered the handling of Pig iron, where
the work was done with no tools

 12.5 long tons were loaded per man per day. Aim is to make it 47 tons per man per day
by reducing the number of unnecessary movements
 4 principles were proposed
 Standardize of implements and working conditions based on the science of work, rigid
rules for each motion of every person
 Careful selection and training to workers and elimination of unwanted people
 Constant help, watchfulness o the management and paying bonus for following the rules
and working fast
 Equal division of the work between workers and management
 First principle is closer to lean manufacturing and is applicable even today.

2.3 Inconsistency of the Human factor

Fitts analyzed work in terms of the needs of various capabilities in order to be able to assign
specific parts of the task to either humans or technology.

MABA-MABA list (Men are better at and Machine are better at)/ Fitts list

 ” The essential role of people were not as a source of physical power but as a controller
of technology and as a provider of functionality that the machines needed but were as
yet unable themselves to provide.
 “The general purpose behind the development of these task analysis procedures was to
fulfill the need for specifying training requirements in relatively detailed and
unambiguous psychological terms”
 Miller’s quote on Task analysis
“A thorough task analysis may be used as an aid in modifying job operations to make
their performance more simple and less liable to error … Furthermore, a task analysis
obviously provides a basis for setting up a training syllabus.”

 The recommended procedure for task analysis began by specifying the human–machine
system criterion output, in other words, what the human–machine systems should be
able to accomplish.
 The definition of what the (hu)man–machine system should do was followed by several
steps to determine which information should be displayed to the operator and which
options he or she should be given so that the machine could be controlled. A new
distinction was also made between discontinuous (procedural) and continuous (tracking)
tasks, something that had not been needed in Taylor’s analysis of manual work. The final
step in the task analysis was to ensure “that each stimulus is linked to a response and
that each response is linked to a stimulus”
 In order for the (hu)man–machine system to work, it was necessary that the operator
interpreted the machine’s output in the proper way and that he or she responded with
the correct input.
 The purpose of task analysis became to determine what the operator had to do to
enable the machine to function as efficiently as possible.

2.4 What should TA bring about or produce?

 When dealing with work, it is necessary to know both what activities (functions) are
required to accomplish a specified objective and how people habitually go about
doing them, particularly since the latter is usually different—and sometimes
significantly so—from the former. Such knowledge is necessary to design,
implement, and manage socio-technical systems, and task analysis looks specifically
at how work takes place and how it can be facilitated.

The focus of task analysis has inevitably changed as the nature of work has changed.

The focus shifts from humans , and humans being treated as transducers and when the computers
became powerful tool, humans focused as an information transducer is refined as said by GOMS.

The purpose of GOMS, which is an acronym that stands for “goals, operators, methods, and selection
rules,” was to provide a system for modeling and describing human task performance in the context of
computer–human interaction.

Operators – denotes set of atomic level operations, that user could combine to serve as a goal

Methods – sequences of operations combined to achieve a single goal

Focus of TA method like GOMS is completely different from scientific management. (since examples of
GOMS manual operators are Keystroke key_name, Type_in string_of_characters, Click mouse_button,
Double_click mouse_button)
Comparing GOMS to the basic tasks that Frank Gilbreth had offered. “Therbligs” based on the 17 types
of motion,(functions) referred to wide range of physical tasks, whereas GOMS referred to a rather
narrow range of mediating activities for mental or cognitive tasks.

 Task analysis today is used to address a host of issues, such as training, performance
assessment, function allocation and automation, procedure writing, maintenance
planning, staffing and job organization, personnel selection, work management, and
probably others as well.

3 Approaches to Task analysis: From analysis to synthesis

TA principle makes use of the principle of decomposition, of breaking something into its constituent
parts, to reason about activities and how they are related and organized. A critical issue in this is the
identification or determination of the parts, the elementary activities or task components, either as
therbligs or the requirements to the human as an input-output transducer.

To be precise, 3 categories:

 Physical tasks – Therblings

 Input-output transducer, with humans being the inputs and analyse the outputs
given by the machine
 GOMS(human in the context of computer- human interaction is considered)

After this, Rouse suggested a list (focused on elements of computer-human interaction)

 The list comprised 11 functions, which in alphabetical order were: communicating,

coordinating tasks, executing procedures, maintaining, planning, problem solving,
recognizing, recording, regulating, scanning, and steering.

The functions proposed by Rouse are on a higher level of abstraction than the therbligs because they
refer to cognitive functions, or cognitive tasks, rather than to physical activities (also they can be
organized in many ways unlike therblings)

3.1 Sequential Task analysis

 Scientific Management aimed to describe and design tasks in minute detail so that workers could
be given precise instructions about how their tasks should be carried out.
 how each task step should be done in the most efficient way, and how the task components
should be distributed among the people involved. This was feasible in the case of manual work.
 Time and motion study was unable to cope up with increasing capabilities of machines, and
people engaging in multiple tasks at the same time.
 The human capacity for processing information could not be extended beyond a “natural” upper
limit, it soon became clear that the human capacity for learning and adaptation was insufficient
to meet technological demands.
 more dependent on mental or cognitive capabilities (comprehension, monitoring, planning).
 reason was machines became better able to control their own “primitive” functions, humans—
who were a costly resource—were left with the task of controlling many machines often
organized in partly self-controlling systems.
  Bainbridge said “the increased interest in human factors among engineers reflects the irony that
the more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the contribution of the
human operator”
 The second irony is that the designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator
to do the tasks which the designer cannot think how to automate. It means that the operator
can be left with an arbitrary col lection of tasks, and little thought may have been given to
providing support for them.
 Third irony: “it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual
intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training
 Hierarchical task analysis is needed to understand the work that could not be described as
simple sequence of steps or actions.

4. The new reality

A substantial part of work changed from being physical movements to become mental operations or
cognitive functions—from therbligs such as select, grasp, reach, move, hold, and release to cognitive
functions such as maintaining, planning, problem solving, recognizing, regulating, and steering.

In consequence, work gradually became unobservable and therefore had to be inferred from whatever
observations could still be made.

Tractable systems can in practice be completely described or specified, while intractable systems cannot.

The challenge for task analysis is, therefore, how to describe something that is not stable, but varies all
the time.

The focus today is not so much on which functions or tasks are needed as components, and how they
can be allocated to, e.g., humans or technology, but rather on how tasks or functions are organized.
And in particular how this organization or dependency can be ensured when the work environment is no
longer stable or completely predictable.

The fundamental problem of intractable systems is that it is impossible to produce a complete

description, which means that there always will be some uncertainty.

The challenge for task analysis is, therefore, how to describe something that is not stable, but varies all
the time.

5. FROM STRUCTURAL TO FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS