Task Analysis

The following is a description of a criteria-based process that we used when we were asked to reduce a technical training course from 15 days to 5. At first sight this seems to be a particularly brutal reduction, but you should bear in mind that this condensed course was needed for a different population of students.

We would use this shortened course to train maintenance engineers. Maintenance engineers were recruited at a lower skill level than the service engineers for whom the original course had been designed. Their duties involved regular cleaning and maintenance of the machines as well as repairing some of the more frequently occurring faults. It was always expected that these maintenance engineers would not be able to repair every single fault they came across. From time to time, they would have to call in a service engineer for assistance.

So, giving maintenance engineers the same training as the service engineers, with all the associated travel and accommodation costs, was not a good investment. Service engineers would still need to have the full three weeks of training.

The criteria we chose for selecting the tasks were:

• Frequency (How often does the task have to be done)
• Difficulty (How hard is it to do the task)
• Criticality (What is the impact of poor task performance?)

Frequency was the most important of the criteria because the strategy was to have the maintenance engineers perform the most commonly occurring tasks. The temptation might be to decide on the basis of frequency alone, but this approach would lead to difficulties. For example, if we decided to teach all tasks that occurred within a certain predetermined period (say six months), we would find we would also be teaching tasks that are so easy that they need not be taught. Clearly, practising these tasks would be a waste of valuable teaching time.

Incorrect performance of other tasks, although infrequent, might lead to disastrous consequences. We would not want to take the risk of omitting them even though the task was performed infrequently.

The criteria of difficulty and criticality were introduced to overcome these problems.

Having determined the decision criteria, a method of rating the tasks against the criteria was required. We need an objective method for determining how frequent, difficult or critical a task is. Tables 1, 2 and 3 show the ratings we used for our three criteria.

Table 1: Frequency ratings

Table 2: Difficulty ratings

Table 3: Criticality ratings

The Task Interval and Definitions will depend on the type of tasks that are to be trained. Getting these right is the most important part of this process.

Another method of assessing the difficulty is to compare the time a freshly trained novice and a master performer take to complete the same task. The greater the difference, the more difficult the task.

The next step is to find a method of making a decision based on combinations of these criteria. One method would simply be to add up the frequency, difficulty and criticality ratings for each task. If a task's total falls below a cut-off point, we would eliminate the task from the course. The problem with this approach is that it gives equal weighting to all the criteria.

To overcome this you can give more weighting to the more important criteria, producing different ratings. However, getting the relative ratings correct starts to become somewhat of a mathematical nightmare.

The approach we decided to take was to list every possible combination of the criteria (111, 112, 113...). For each combination we used our experience to decide whether a task with that combination of ratings would normally be included in a course.

So, a task with a '111' combination of ratings (task encountered at least once every six months, very difficult to perform and a safety hazard) would definitely be included in the course. A task with a rating combination of 132 would not be trained. (The '3' difficulty rating signifies that the task can be performed correctly without any training.)

Table 4 give the 'train' or 'no-train' decisions for all these combinations of frequency, difficulty and criticality.

Give give your training analysts the authority to make different decisions on the basis of their judgement and experience - provided that the reasons for those decisions are recorded.

Very experienced training analysts would probably not need to use this matrix in the normal course of their work, but it is an extremely powerful tool for communicating the rationale of training decisions to your clients. It is also very useful for providing 'instant experience' to less experienced training analysts.

Notice that the program sometimes adds notes. This is to remind the analyst to make some checks before finally making a 'Don't Train' decision.

Table 4: 'Train - Don't Train' matrix

Also see Task Analyser program

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