Hi everyone my name is Caitlin Woods and I'm a PhD student from The University of Western Australia.
Our paper is titled Using Job Characteristics to Inform Interface Design for Industrial Maintenance
Procedures. Asset-owning organisations such as mining companies hire maintenance technicians
to monitor equipment for potential failure or fix equipment after it has failed. These maintenance
technicians use procedure documentation to guide them through complex manual tasks.
These tasks could take 20 minutes or could span across multiple days. In many organisations
these documents are still paper-based. The idea of digitising these procedures and presenting them
to technicians on mobile devices such as tablets or head-mounted displays is of great interest to
these organisations. To inform the design of a user interface for maintenance procedures
we conducted seven interviews with experienced maintainers from a process plant. The process plant
has six teams each with six to ten maintainers. In our interviews we were able to examine a range of
technical roles including welding, fitting and scaffolding. All of our participants were male
as only a very small percentage of maintainers in Australia are female, according to the Australian
Bureau of Statistics. We sought the experienced technicians with greater than three years
experience and, as a result, all of our participants had worked at multiple sites throughout their
careers or for multiple companies. Our interviews ranged from 30 to 45 minutes.
During the interviews participants were asked about their current procedure management process
and their perceptions of using some technology, namely tablets or head-mounted displays,
to replace this process. Audio recordings that were taken of the interviews were transcribed
into an anonymous format and thematic analysis was performed on the data. We
progressively refined the issues raised by maintainers through a thematic analysis.
At a detailed level we identified eight core factors that affect a maintainer's intention
to use technology in their work. One factor, for instance, is task complexity. That is, the type
of task influenced whether a technician would use the technology. For instance, one participant said
"for servicing major compressors you'd probably find that a head-mounted display was used a lot
more". After further iterations of the themes we arranged the factors along two dimensions.
The first dimension is past versus present and the second dimension is external, things
that are outside of maintainers control, versus individual. Six of the factors sit in the present-individual
category. We found that these factors contribute to many of the features that work
design theory and job characteristics model from organisational psychology propose should lead to
meaningful work. We further refine these factors into three categories, work identity, agency and
community. We use an analysis of these factors and the implications of them in maintenance to inform
the requirements for solutions for maintenance procedures. The first factor is work identity,
that is the sense of purpose, pride and meaningfulness the employees feel in their work.
A maintenance task such as fixing a pump requires patience, problem solving and
persistence. Ethnographic studies in similar work have described the ideas of heroism and competent
practice leading to a sense of identity in similar work. The emergence of work identity in the
interviews suggests that designers should consider this when creating technology for this domain.
For example the technology could allow users to feel challenged in their work by targeting work
instructions at the right technical level. Agency is having a sense of control and decision making
capability over your work. This is critical in ensuring procedures are not followed blindly
and to ensure that maintainers think critically about the documentation that they're following.
To account for agency a designer could allow users to provide feedback when something's not right
about a procedure document or consider what will happen when a user goes off track in a procedure.
The last job characteristic that emerged in our interviews was community. We found that the
maintenance team was a strong close-knit unit much like firefighters or underground miners.
Participants valued working in a team and also wanted to look out for their team mates and keep
them safe. Some recommendations to consider for community are, to allow users to report hazards
that they see around the site, or allow users to see past comments made on procedure documentation
by other technicians. The next step for this research is to build and evaluate a user
interface for maintenance procedures based on these recommendations. Also to conduct
a further analysis of the concept of targeting work instructions to the right technical level.
Finally, this research calls for a further examination of the impact of technology
on work design. Thank you for your time, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me.