TOOLS TO INCORPORATE SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES DURING THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER-BASED SYSTEMS

The organization, findings and outcomes of a joint industrial/academic project are described. The principal goal of the project was to devel op and test some tools through which people involved in system develop ment can incorporate explicit consideration of certain key psychologic al and organizational issues. Five tools developed for this purpose ar e outlined. These are concerned with the design of work organization, job design, the allocation of tasks between humans and computers, usab ility and task analysis. The use of the tools is described in a 'live' system development project in a large company. The authors briefly re view the extent to which these tools meet a set of pre-specified requi rements, compare their approach with those of Mumford (1986) and Lim e t al. (1992), and make explicit what claims they are making of these t ools.