War Stories:

a collection of potential hazards

Welcome to the War Stories Web Site. Here is a collection of incidents of problems and their solutions that have been observed during various stages of the deployment process of different systems within healthcare.

How to use this web site

This web site has been designed to be used as a reference for anyone involved in the development or deployment of any socio-technical system within a healthcare setting. The war stories have been gathered from experiences within various healthcare domains around the UK. They are arranged according to the stage in which they arose during deployment and can also be accessed by keywords/types of hazards. It is intended that the resource may be a useful resource for those involved in similar projects.

We would also encourage others to submit their own war stories on similar projects (we have provided the facility to do this). The more war stories we collect, the more we can learn from each other.

Introduction

Professional designers informally use "war stories" - reports of events, problems, solutions and so on that occur during systems design and deployment projects - as a means of sharing knowledge and experience to enable one another to learn from past successes and failures. Given that sharing war stories has been shown to be important and useful for designers (Orr 1996) but is an informal and ad hoc activity our aim here is to assemble a resource of war stories relating to deployment for use by all stakeholders involved in the deployment process.

By reading through the collection it is hoped that stakeholders can get an idea of the types of problems that may arise in a deployment process, when they may arise and how they were dealt with at the time.

The principle behind this resource is the idea that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Lancaster Personnel