3 THE WORK PROCESS WHEN GOING TO BRITISH AIRWAYS THE FIRST TIME THE...

9.3 The work process

When going to British Airways the first time the preparational work was not enough, and

some of the information available was not up to date. Everybody at Carmen was very

nice, and they told everything they knew, if they were asked. The problem was that we

did not know what to ask for, since we had so little knowledge of the aircraft business

and no experience at all. The preparations were founded upon contextual design

methodology, as well as experience from previous work. The results of the interviews

were satisfying, even though there were some problems to keep focus, to stick to the

subject, this because our inexperience of performing interviews in combination with the

unfamiliar and new environment. When returning from the trip, the performance was

considered to be not satisfactory, but now when looking back we have another opinion.

This was actually the day when we were taught the most, and collected the most

fundamental information that has been the basis for the thesis.

One important aspect that has been very helpful is the fact that we got several contacts at

British Airways, and this lead to that we were able to complement the information with

questions via e-mail. Our understanding for the users situation, as well as our own task

became more obvious as time went by and the more we worked with the information we

had. We kept on choosing between ten different thesis subjects, and needed help from

the tutors to be able to narrow it down to just one. Not until then, when the period of

despair was over, we were able to focus on the design and what type of tool that actually

would be helpful to the users. New energy and a lot of experimental ideas came up. At

this point we started to work more and more with the rest of the Descartes team, there

were several workshops, and since we now had more knowledge about the business in

general and the Descartes project in particular, more relevant questions were to be asked

and give more qualified answers to their questions.

The fact that the system Descartes, in which the concept Operations Monitor is just one

part, is a research project and therefore not yet developed and completely implemented,

has had a great impact on our work. Some things have changed along the way, definitions

has not been decided upon nor unified. This has forced us to make assumptions, based

upon a mix of wishes and requirements, both for our point as well as from the

developers point. In the early stages of the work, there were a lot of worries for the

technical requirements of the Operations Monitor, it was first decided to be a thin client,

meaning no room for almost any graphical visualization, but after a while when

discussions upon software contracts came up, it was decided that we would just not care

about this. A lot of things will probably change again, both technical issues and

requirements, especially when things will be more developed and customers are to take

part in the decision process too. Of course it has also been a great advantage to have the

possibility to take part of a research project, since there is great opportunity to

experiment with ideas and techniques, and to actually be able to effect the development

process, by starting discussions or finding factors there has not been thought of.

One factor that have had a great impact on this thesis, and as it will have on

future work concerning this concept, is how the alarm generation will be handled, as this

is not yet decided upon today. The existence of our version of the concept Operations

Monitor is actually depending upon this.

The questions set up in the beginning has been answered by design recommendations,

and partly by the development of a prototype. It would have been preferred that the

recommendations were more detailed, describing exactly what functions are vital and

exactly how the design and interactions would be. This has not been possible, since there

is a great lack in our knowledge of how the future users think while prioritizing and

solving problems, how they use their experience, and also because of the complexity of

the context and the problems within it. It would have been preferably if the context in

which the crew controllers work had been analyzed in its total, meaning a user analysis

and a task analysis including all resource areas. This would probably provide a great deal

of aspects to the understanding of the complexity in the control room, to detect the

hidden patterns that has to be supported for the success by the introduction of a new

system.