Testing
The last and most important part of the Development Sprint involves testing and this should be discussed upfront during the requirements gathering, confirmed during the prototyping and eventually executed at the delivery stage. White (2015) in his keynote address brings up the challenge of interconnectivity between information systems as a challenge affecting the industry. Furthermore, he refers to the term fault free testing, which is more applicable to Control and Instrumentation but, is of importance since the method of testing proposed for our solution is preferred in the Quality instance to ensure a lower impact on the Production side of the software application.
Leadership Influence
Tidd (2005) used Porters model to explain the opposing strategies that organizations follow. The first is that of a market leader driving innovation and the second the market follower who learns by following the experiences of others. In the nuclear industry this is called Operating Experience. This industry can also be classified as mainly market followers due to the strong dependance on the culture of safety.
Hore-Lacy (2012) draws an analogy between the nuclear industry and the car industry by comparing a car from 1960 with a car from today. Many advances and innovations were made. However, in the nuclear industry we were quite conservative and the conservatism stems from conservative decision making by our leaders.
Tidd (2005) exclaims that it is successful organizations that gained their success from innovation. Innovation thus, should be driven with a top-down approach.
Impact of Culture
Two very good examples exist that shows the impact of culture on this solution, and it relates to Gustavsson (2005) with their linking of critical response times to ICT Infrastructure and Lee (2016) who linked safety culture to human performance. Safety culture is the shared values and beliefs within an organization and relates strongly on the sub-cultures formed within business functions.
In the problem identification we are attempting to implement the Design Thinking, prototyping along with Business Process changes to ensure we bring about a reduction in the number of support tickets as well as ensure faster delivery to the users in the hope that we can deliver value. Value in the sense of safe operations as well as effective work execution through the continued use of plant software applications.
To achieve this, we need to consider the Maintenance notification process as well as the Engineering Problem Report (EPR) process. Maintenance deal with their notifications based on priority as dictated by the plant. Engineering deals with EPR’s based on the importance to plant operations. Both processes are decided based on a type of importance categorization. That of priority or that of importance to safe plant operations based on whatever Limiting Condition for Operations (LCO) exist. Kim (2020) is a good example of how a business process like LCO Monitoring can be detailed and prototyped into a solution.
The key challenge for OT is to manage the support ticket process and utilize a prioritization matrix that is aligned with the plant needs to ensure proper resolution based on plant and by relation, user need. The prevailing culture in our industry is a culture of safety and by doing this we can align OT to the rest of the functions.
References
White, A., 2015, March. The nuclear industry is changing-and so is the regulator. In IET Conference Proceedings. The Institution of Engineering & Technology.
Tidd, J., Bessant, J. and Pavitt, K., 2005. Integrating technological, market and organizational change. Managing Innovation.
Hore-Lacy, I., 2012. Innovation in nuclear power. Energy & environment, 23(6-7), pp.979-992.
Gustavsson, R., Mellstrand, P., Törnqvist, B., Akkermans, H. and EnerSearch, A.B., 2005. Dependable ICT support of power grid operations. BTH2006.
Lee, Y.H., 2016. Safety culture, a new challenge to human factors engineering for 21st century. Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea, 35(6), pp.473-492.
Kim, J., Lee, D., Yang, J. and Lee, S., 2020. Conceptual design of autonomous emergency operation system for nuclear power plants and its prototype. Nuclear Engineering and Technology, 52(2), pp.308-322.