Jennifer McGovern Narkevicius, PhD Managing Director of Jenius, LLC
All systems have users, operators, maintainers, support personnel, managers, supervisors, and others. Therefore Systems Design must include human considerations via Human Factors Engineering as part of the Systems Engineering process. Human Factors Engineering acts as the conduit for other domains and is essential to including Manpower, Personnel and Training in the Systems Engineering Process.
All technical systems are human-populated. Those humans interact with the system as users, operators, maintainers, support personnel, managers, supervisors, or in some other role. In those roles, they contribute capabilities and limitations to the system as a whole. Success of these is related to meeting the needed outcomes. Achieving success is dependent on the performance of the people. Achieving the desired outcomes is particularity important to the developers of complex systems and relies on successful appropriate training preparing the humans in the system for their roles.
Recent experience in complex systems has illustrated clearly that Systems Engineering requires integration of Human Factors Engineering through Human Systems Integration into the Systems Engineering process. Human Factors Engineering can act as a conduit for other domains that are not as tightly coupled with Systems Engineering including Manpower, Personnel, and Training. Human Systems Integration practice is only as strong as the integration of the domains participating. Therefore it is essential that the domains work together. Two domains that have traditionally worked well together are Human Factors Engineering and Training.