It’s Critical!
Much of what I look at in an analysis is how often someone does a task and how hard that task is perceived to be by those who do it. However, that is not always the only measurements worth looking at. At times, I look at another measurement - criticality.
It’s hard to properly define a “critical” task. I’m curious if anyone feels there is one right way to look at it so I’ve decided to measure “criticality” of a task by looking at two related concepts. One is how likely is something going to go wrong with this task? This related to the difficulty but not perfectly. It is possible for a task (whether easy or hard) to be likely or unlikely to have problems. It could be something inherently wrong with the process. Maybe there is known faulty equipment that can’t be replaced yet. Here is a scale to measure the likelihood of something going wrong.
1 - Very Unlikely (chances are 0.01% - 19.99%
2 - Unlikely (chances are 20.00% - 39.99%
3 - Even Odds; 50/50 (chances are 40.00% - 59.99%
4 - Likely (chances are 60.00% - 79.99%
5 - Very Likely (chances are 80.00% - 99.99%
6 - Every time (chances are 100.00%)
Another facet is “How bad will it be if something does go wrong?” It may only be a minor inconvenience and you have to do something over. You may not even notice something went wrong. Or, it could mean someone dies or is severely injured. Here is a scale to measure how severe of an impact we may consider.
0 - No noticeable impacts
1 - Loss of time/effort; Repeat process; Frustration
2 - Small financial losses; Loss of customer satisfaction
3 - Moderate financial losses but recoverable; Loss of customers
4 - Light to moderate injuries; significant financial loss; permanent reputational damage
5 - Severe injuries; bankruptcy of organization
6 - Catastrophic Loss of Life
For me, critical tasks are those who are likely going to have problems and those problems are going to be significant. Like with measuring frequency and difficulty, we know we can’t train everything equally nor should we. We have limited time and resources and we must allocate it in smart ways to maximize the return we get on that investment. Here is a matrix to look at how these two measurements combine to find the “critical” tasks.
The green section refers to criticality we can ignore. These kinds of tasks may have a few challenges but they aren’t the kinds of challenges that warrant any adjustment to our training strategy.
Yellow tasks offer some significance. They are either very likely to happen in some cases OR there is a chance of significant or catastrophic loss. To me, any possibility of catastrophic loss of life warrants a little extra attention. For these tasks, I move them up one to the category decided through frequency and difficulty. This means if I normally find a task to be category two but some criticality - I move it up to a category one task.
This leaves those tasks where it is both likely to have problems AND leads to severe outcomes. For these tasks, move them up two categories to the task rating. This means even category three tasks (low frequency and high difficulty) could become category one if appropriate.