Assessing the value of human factors initiatives

This paper examines the effectiveness of human factors initiatives and addresses some difficulties reported in calculating the value of such interventions. Company representatives and researchers applied a novel probabilistic assessment tool to estimate the financial impact of two macro-ergonomic projects. Key benefits of the company intranet project include reduced administrative and operational costs compared to a paper-based system; time savings for users asking for, providing and receiving information; and improved system usability and higher levels of usage. The communities of practice project demonstrates value through more efficient distribution and retrieval of information; reduced duplication by re-using technical knowledge to solve similar problems and improved sharing of good working practices, lessons and resources. The strengths of the tool include transparency, being quick and easy to learn and the collaborative workshop format, involving researches and key representatives from the organization. It makes a useful contribution to the challenge of assessing the financial value of ergonomic interventions, and, by exploiting its diagnostic and planning capabilities, could be extended to other domains.