Updated Best Practice Guides

Well, where do I start?  It has been a few months since I have had time to sit down and do an update.  I have even had a few emails and phone calls from some concerned customers who log-on regularly.  I have to be honest, we have been overloaded.  I have had 4 different teams working flat out on projects and I have been continuously out of town and trying hard to keep up with all that has been going on.

January started with us picking up one of the biggest projects we have done along with a lot of smaller projects.  We then picked up another extremely large project, which has been great but a lot of work.

I have spent 3 months in Salt Lake City doing a Best Practices Study with my business colleague Jack Pankoff and a new employee for UCDS Inc., Harry Williams.

At the same time we have been doing Operator Workload Studies and High Performance HMI Workshops and development of HMI Philosophy and Style Guide documents.  Jack and I have completely updated the best practice guides originally developed by the ASM Consortium to incorporate much of the latest practices that have been identified through some extensive Human factors studies by organizations like the UK Health & Safety Executive, DOT & PHMSA and the latest facts about the impact of human factors.

The new study has already proved to be a powerful tool for this customer and is changing day to day business.

We had the privilege of riding in these big trucks.

We also have been doing a lot of refinery work in Salt Lake City and I had to pull my friend Harlan Graf from ConocoPhillips – San Francisco Refinery out of retirement.  Harlan is a great resource.  He has so much experience of staffing and control rooms he is a great fit for our team.  He also worked with me on the re-design of a Chemical Plants Control Room in Beaumont Texas during this same period so we have been hoping on and off planes a lot.  Harlan also started working on a major new project in Canada and we spent a few days in Saskatoon recently.  The immigration folks certainly don’t get any easier!  I got called into the office for a long wait before getting clearance to enter the Country.  A British and an American passport do not make life any easier with Canada.  They are one of the hardest Countries in the world to work with between immigration and their confusing tax system.