Barriers to Implementing Human Factors Technology

This paper discusses overcoming the obstacles encountered as you go about the rigorous application of human factors principles. Because we believe that poor cross functional (across organization lines) communication and resistance to change are the main obstacles to implementing human factors, we first describe cross functional communication, resistance to change, and human factors. Then by analogy, show how these obstacles that made it difficult to implement modern control systems also make it difficult to implement human factors. We offer implementation recommendations to overcome these obstacles. From analogous experience in process control, we believe that human factors will be applied extensively and successfully when people understand how to recognize a need for human factors work rather than be told to simply apply isolated principles or theories. Some design aspects and justification are briefly discussed, but details are left to other resources as given in the references.