Godstone Regional Control Centre
Mouchel Parkman
background
Steming from the Government white paper on the future of transport in 1998, the Highways Agency implemented a programme of delivering Regional Control Centres to improvement management of the major road network. The RCCs would improve the coordination between the Police and the Highways Agency Traffic Officers. Regional Control Centres opened in the West Midlands (Quinton, M5 J3) in April 2004; South East (Godstone, M25 J6) in August 2005; North West (Newton-le-Willows, M6 J22-23) and North East (Wakefield, M1 J39) in September 2005; East (South Mimms, M25 J 23) in October 2005; South West (Avonmouth, M5 J 18) in December 2005; and East Midlands (Nottingham, M1 J26) in February 2006
project
We were commissioned by Mouchel Parkman for the Highways Agency to develop a workstation specification and control room layout for the Regional Control Centre South East in Godstone. The project programme had four elements: (1) Ergonomics & Design Specification, (2) preliminary workstation design, (3) control room layout, and (4) final workstation design.
implementation
We held a series of stakeholder workshops to establish the operational and user requirements for the control room. The specification developed from this work provided a "requirements manual" for all the subsequent ergonomics & design activity.
We developed an outline workstation design suitable for the identification of potential furniture suppliers. The design met all the identified user requirements as well as ergonomics standards. It covered the critical workstation geometry (inc. reach, viewing distances, sight lines, etc), maintenance requirements, cable management and materials & finishes.
A workshop was held to derive the control room layout based on the workstation design and the functional relationships between roles & groups.
outcome
The Godstone ICO successfully went live in 2005. The quality of the ergonomic design input used to develop it meant that Godstone was established as a template for the development of the subsequent ICOs.