Design team structure

Clearcut Mission. As with other team structures discussed in this volume, the design team needs a clearly articulated understanding of its mission, responsibilities, and limits. 

Structure packages to consistently separate interfaces from implementations, and aim for early initial definition of interfaces. Also, designate team roles that cut across parallel activities, watching for issues or overlaps that should be addressed separately. 

Levitt, R.E., Cohen, G.P., Kuntz, J.C., Nass, C.L, Christiansen, T., Jin, Y. The virtual design team Simulating how organizational structure and information processing tools affect team performance. In Carley, K.M., Prietula, M.J. (eds.) Computational Organization Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (1994)... 

The main positive contributions from using ISO 11064 pointed out by the interviewees were that almost three quarters (73.9%) foimd the interdisciplinary design team useful and to be a good risk management tool. More than half (56.5%) of the interviewees found that ISO 11064 helps structure the design process and more than one third (34.8%) stated that it legitimates HF work and that the results are followed up. The interviewed CCR operators pointed out that their views on the design were taken into account and user involvement was mentioned as a positive contribution by one quarter (26.1%) of the interviewees. 

Mary interviewees stated that the standard helped structure the processes and legitimate the HF work. Thus the main contributions from the standard appeared to come from relatively high abstraction levels, which can be due to this being a process-oriented standard with high level requirements, such as formation of the interdisciplinary design team and user participation. 

From this information, the Design Team should recommend a program structure to the Steering Committee. The structure should include the following ... 

Step 1 serves for the safety assessors to obtain a complete and concise overview of the operation, and to freeze this description during each safety assessment cycle. Main input to step 1 is a description of the operational concept from the designers, while its output is a sufficiently complete, structured, consistent and concise description of the operation considered. The operation should be described in generic terms, the description should provide any particular operational assumption to be used in the safety assessment, and the description has to be verified by the operational concept designers. Typically during this step, holes and inconsistencies in the concept as developed are also identified and immediately fed back to the design team... 

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