bloody tradespeople can't fill out forms....

A successful month so far with an article accepted in Reliability Engineering & System Safety (RESS) based around the work we've been doing in Manual Data Acquisition. As non- engineers we were quite surprised as to the amount of engineering data still collected by human beings! At the same time we heard a constant stream of complaints from people within the engineering field concerning the generally poor quality of data provided by engineering and technical personnel.

This obviously led to a research project looking what might be done to improve the quality of manually acquired data.... hence the RESS article. We had originally intended to apply the VERY well known model of Theory of Planned Behaviour to the issue but our research highlighted to us the significant effects of organisational structure, job design and institutional factors in determining data quality and its utilisation.

We identified that at a localised level specialist groups were highly effective in collecting, recording and using data considered to be high quality. The manner in which this data was collected was variable from "little black books" to relatively sophisticated MS Access databases. In simple terms... data that was considered relevant and useful to them in their day-to day activities was given a high priority and a high level of investment in the data acquisition process was evident.

A different story emerged for data required outside the immediate boundary of the group (e.g. for centralised reporting requirements and QA). In these cases the relevance and criticality of the data was questioned and in some instances dismissed as irrelevant, worthless and a waste of valuable time. It became quickly apparent that a lack of feedback as to the use of the data's outcomes and consequences was a key factor in the level of commitment to the quality of the data collected.

While these are early days and the research is on-going it's fair to say that our results indicate that too often "bloody operators" or "lazy tradespeople" are perhaps scapegoats for poorly designed policy, procedure and organisational structure that fail to effectively utilise data that is captured or worse, require people to collected data that is never used!