identify: EITHER any activity you carry out or have witnessed or know or have read about, OR any safety event you have witnessed, heard about, or read about. If you select an activity, predict and analyse the potential risks of accidents or other harmful outcomes in terms of possible errors. If you select an event or accident which has occurred then analyse this incident itself in terms of the human and organisational errors which occurred. This could also be an opportunity to align coursework with future career plans, i.e., look at issues in the domain you intend to work in after graduation (oil & gas, construction, etc).

Your analysis should include use of several of the methods and representational forms covered in this class. These could include, but are not restricted to: risk matrices; task or function analyses; accident models (such as linear flow charts, epidemiological and ergonomics frameworks, swiss cheese, event tree, fault tree, bow tie); human error identification/quantification systems (such as HAZOP, GEMS, TRACEr, HEART etc).
The activity or event analysed could include: everyday activities such as driving, bike riding, cooking etc); special activities known to you (sailing, skiing, pot holing etc); activities of family or friends or that you have read about or imagine; activities you can observe (bus driving, construction worker, club security etc); incidents or accidents that you have experienced; incidents or accidents that you have read about. You may find it more interesting and a richer and easier exercise if the activity/incident you take has a combination of physical, cognitive and social components, but at the same time should not be so large and diffuse that you cannot focus.

The coursework could include: a text description of th e activity or incident; some task/activity/function description and analysis (ie what should be done); an analysis of the potential (or actual) human and organisational errors involved (active and latent); a breakdown of the types of these errors; possibly some idea as to likelihood (ie maybe some quantification); a justification for the approach and tools you have used; and your view as to their value and ease of use – or otherwise!

However, the intention of this coursework is to give practice in using tools and analysing/assessing risks and human reliability/error, and in seeing how difficult this is to do, so there is no one right or wrong way to go about this assignment. I will be interested in what you come up with. It gives an opportunity to try the various approaches and tools looked at in class to describe, represent and analyse activities, tasks, incidents/accidents and actual organisation failure and human error or potential for these. I am mainly evaluating your knowledge, including understanding strengths and limitations, of what approaches are appropriate and tools and techniques available, and how to use and report these. Once you have decided on your topic/focus and possibly tools and techniques I am happy to quickly give advice in a break from the class or just afterwards. Where you use any relevant literature, published sources in journal articles and books should be cited and fully referenced. Whilst web resources can be cited these should not be the majority of sources and these need full details of location and date accessed.

The assignment should be of between 5 and 10 pages. The majority should be graphical or tabular analyses. Text will account for at most 25% of the final grade and should be roughly in the range of 500-1000 words. Since producing graphical charts on computer may not be easy for all of you I would accept legible hand drawn ones.