Pentagon adoption of ‘human readiness standard’ will lead to industry following, says expert

AIAA SCITECH FORUM, ORLANDO, Fla. — The U.S. Defense Department’s adoption last year of the human readiness standard will lead to increased industry use, said one panelist here on Thursday.

The Pentagon “is saying human readiness is on par with technical readiness — they’re equal now,” said Judi See, a human factors engineer at Sandia National Laboratories who led the writing committee that developed the formal technical standard.

The department “is leading the way for other organizations to do the same,” she added. “With them adopting the HRL [human readiness level] scale, there’s going to be a whole slew of industry contractors now following because it’s going to be put on their contracts.”

The nine-level human readiness scale, considered a complement to the technology readiness level scale, is meant to evaluate and track a system’s readiness for human use.

See noted the Army has been an early adopter, calling the service “our poster child” for applying the HRL scale.

According to the Pentagon, the Army has applied HRLs to development, test and evaluation.

Elsewhere in the government, See said FAA has “been doing extensive research on how the HRL scale fits … within their existing processes,” and noted that NASA too has started thinking about how to incorporate the scale.

Sylvain Bruni of Aptima, another panelist, said he expects increased HRL adoption to be “a combination of top down and bottom up.”

When companies see the value of the scale, they will be likely to use it again, he added. “The constant back and forth of people talking about it and actually showing that there is value” will boost adoption.

“The key aspect is that if your human readiness lags technology readiness, you are going to fail,” said Bruni. “That is why it is so important for the community to embrace this as a tool to manage risks.”

“Your system is not going to be ready until it is human ready,” he added.