Designing Effective Systems: A Tool Approach

Abstract

Successfully designing large, complex systems requires including people and organization as elements in the system. Many current design approaches consider only the system’s technical aspects. We need an expanded approach to system design that incorporates the insights from each of three disciplines: system engineering, human factors, and organizational design. Only in this way can we address the dynamics of technology, people, and organizations in a single, coherent approach. The need for a new design strategy is magnified by the accelerating rate of change in the business and technology environment. System design efforts are often stymied by the fact that manufacturing businesses have constantly changing needs and requirements. Companies constantly need to shift the balance between quality, cost, and manufacturing capacity to meet evolving market goals. Moreover, these operations have to consider competitive pressures for the control of cost and schedule, rapidly changing product technology, changes in worker demographics, worker skill, and education, and regulatory pressures. The mission of a plant changes over time. Based on the notion that truly effective systems must offer tools for skilled work, our approach to system design offers an alternative to standard automation strategies, one better able to deal with this context of change. Systems designed as tools for skilled work can help organizations take full advantage of the investment they have already made in people, preserve the tacit knowledge and judgment that cannot be automated, and enable workers to solve problems and improve operations. These tools can help to expand the way existing data are used to help identify and solve problems. They can optimize the effectiveness of existing production processes. They do not constrain the workers by demanding that they follow strictly prescribed sequences, but instead enhance the workers’ ability to respond quickly and effectively to constantly changing combinations of events, to allocate and coordinate limited human resources and materials, and to work together more effectively through ongoing, company-wide collaboration. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some key elements of an expanded approach to system design. We first discuss the foundations, perspective, and techniques of our approach to system design.