What Is Task Analysis?

Task analysis is to have the conditions required to perform the task; have specific goals; have a clear start and terminal; occur within a certain time; may be interrupted by another task; may involve multiple people.

The so-called task analysis is the process of summarizing and organizing each task that constitutes job responsibilities through the basic methods of job analysis such as target decomposition, investigation, and observation to make it clear, systematic, and modular. ^[1]

Task analysis is a cross research object in industrial engineering, ^[4] industrial psychology and human resource management, and it is a systematic method to explain all behavioral roles and relationships between individuals and systems.

In a human-machine system, task analysis is performed from top to bottom, often as the basic stage of system design, or to evaluate the running system. The so-called top-down means that the process of task analysis is from general to specific, that is, from work system objectives, work system functions and work system operations to tasks and subtasks that have been assigned to people in the system. The end result of the analysis is to produce an information base that can fully describe the people, equipment and their interconnections needed to achieve the goals of the working system. This top-down task analysis step can be summarized as follows:

1. Develop a task analysis plan, determine the personnel conditions required to implement this plan, clarify their responsibilities, and train relevant personnel.

2. The working system can only be analyzed with the working system operation.

3. Form a description of the results of the task analysis. ^[1]