Team Cognitive Work Analysis

Abstract

Today's complex sociotechnical systems involve more than just single operators and often include rich team interactions. In this article, the authors explore cognitive work analysis (CWA), a method typically used for deriving design requirements to support single operators, and rework this methodology into a version that is intended to show requirements required to support successful team collaboration. Team-suitable approaches are presented for the first two steps of CWA, work domain analysis and control task analysis. These approaches are collected from past attempts to model teams with CWA and two new teamwork visualizations, collaboration tables and decision wheels. The applicability of the extended models is demonstrated with a health care example.

Cognitive Work Analysis: New Dimensions

“…In developing Team CWA, we quickly realized that team concerns influenced all levels of the analysis and could not be easily reduced to a single analysis phase [13]. In fact, isolating team requirements from the primary CWA could be ineffective and lead to a loss of information.…”

“…We suggest a full four phases looking at team WDA, team ConTA, team StrA, and team Competency Analysis (Figure 1). In the next sections these phases are described, in the context of a healthcare example taken from [13].…”

Cognitive work analysis and simulation (CWAS): practical use of cognitive work analysis in system design

“…The team ConTA model offered by Ashoori and Burns can help the representation, in case of studying teams (Ashoori & Burns, 2012). Figure 3 presents a sample of the team abstraction hierarchy, where responsibilities are defined by colors and different dashed lines.…”

“…Figure 3 presents a sample of the team abstraction hierarchy, where responsibilities are defined by colors and different dashed lines. Ashoori and Burns (Ashoori & Burns, 2012).…”

“…In addition to the wide use of CWA, researchers have suggested extensions to the CWA. Ashoori and Burns (2012) have presented a method to incorporate CWA for studying systems involving teams of operators. Furthermore, CWA has been applied to domains other than system and interface design, such as: team design, evaluation of system design proposals, and training needs (Naikar, Pearce, Drumm, & Sanderson, 2003;Naikar & Sanderson, 2001;Naikar, 2006).…”