For 30 years, the British Army has employed the Systems Approach to Training (SAT) as a means of quality assuring its most important and expensive activity undertaken to ensure operational success - training. However, while the academic principles underpinning SAT remain sound, the supporting procedures and organisational infrastructure were developed before the widespread procurement and use of synthetic training environments to which they are difficult to apply.

The result was that the military's own training specialists were often denied a voice within the procurement cycle until too late. While many training equipments remain elegant pieces of engineering, they are frequently over complex, fielded too late to support the initial deployment of the operational equipment and, above all, badly designed from an instructional point of view.

In an initial attempt to rectify this situation, Training Support Branch developed guidelines for Training Needs Analysis (TNA), in which TNA is understood to be a special case of SAT. The guidelines provide a framework within which TNAs may be managed and quality assured. Variants of TNA procedures were developed independently by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force at about the same time and have since been harmonised to reflect a tri-Service view.

The effectiveness of the TNA procedures would still, however, be sub-optimal until adequately supported by elements of the organisational infrastructure of the procurement system. This paper describes the results of a study undertaken by the authors to address this issue. The proposed solution integrates the complementary concerns of the procurement system, Integrated Logistics Support and Human Factors Integration ('MANPRINT').

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Cliff Martindill