In 1995, when John Lauber arrived at Delta, a Corporate Human Factors group
was formed within Corporate Safety. The original group was Capt. Ray
Justinic, Dr. Steve Premore, and myself. We crafted a plan for integrating
human factors into the organization. The full paper is available in the
proceedings of the 1995 Flight Safety Foundation Seattle Conference or a
condensed paper is available for download in Adobe PDF format on the CRM
Developers Archive and at the following web address:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vince_mancuso/biblio.htm
I think you will find many of the issues surrounding integration of human
factors on a corporate level addressed in this paper. The Seattle paper is
about 14 pages long and includes a lot of detail. The paper available for
download is about 6 pages long and is more of an executive summary.
In 1995, Delta Corporate Human Factors began a program on the Atlanta ramp.
I worked with an outstanding ramp supervisor named Tim Johnson to craft a
prototype ramp resource management program. The program included on the
job training as well as CRM performance data collection. We collected pre
and post training (performance) measures as well as 3 month performance
follow-up performance measures. These performance measures suggested
direct correlations between ramp performance and incident levels.
Steve Predmore presented a paper at Ohio State highlighting Delta's Ramp
Human Factors program. Perhaps we can ask Steve if he would be willing to
have the paper posted within the Web Archive. Steve has actively been
working on a MX Human Factors program. Steve is the only remaining member
of the original Corporate Human Factors team. Both Ray and I have returned
to line flying.
>From personal experience, I have found that a program has to have both
departmental and local ownership to succeed. A pure corporate program that
doesn't have a human factors group within the specific operations
departments will probably not be able to move programs into action.
There is a group of individuals (a few of whom are on this listserver) who
have been working to craft a generic business plan for the next generation
human factors program. Corporate managers realized long ago that CRM
programs have very little capability to systematically diagnose problems.
They further realized that using just one method (training) to respond to
human performance issues is not the answer.
The next generation of CRM is not CRM, it is a human performance program
that uses CRM as just one of many available tools. This business plan
focuses on how a corporate manager can use the latest resources and
technology to build a human performance program capable of both focused
diagnosis and flexible response. The intended audience is corporate
managers who own the checkbook. It should be available for download in a
couple months.
Best Regards,
Vince Mancuso