Navy provides maritime forces that combine with Army and Air Force to form the Australian Defence Force’s capacity to defend Australia and contribute to regional security, support global interests, shape the strategic environment, and protect national interests.
In 2009 the New Generation Navy Program (NGN) was established to addresses the structure, culture and leadership changes required for Navy to meet the challenges of delivering future capability. NGN commenced a series of ongoing Sustainable Workload Studies (SWS) designed initially to investigate baseline individuals’ activities, working hours and sleep levels in relation to crew fatigue, performance and endurance, to provide information on optimising working hours to ensure better ship safety.
After the Navy Capability Costing System (NCCS) developers spent time at sea observing sailor’s work processes and routines and configured Navy’s software to automate the capture of individuals’ daily activity as a by-product of the existing ship’s operations planning process. The software became known as the Navy Management Diary (NMD). The NMD prototype provides an indication of individual, watch, department and ship risk-of-fatigue with a ‘traffic light’ warning system, delivering an “instantaneous indicative risk-of-fatigue reassessment of the future program as activities are introduced, modified or deleted,” said warrant officer Chris Rowley of HMAS Arunta.
In 2014, Navy was recognised as an ABA100 Winner of the Australian Business Award for Innovation. Despite its prototype status, ship’s Commands requested to retain the NMD for their continued planning, inter-departmental coordination and optimisation of individual and watch workloads, training and experience. Navy Management Diary also provides the individual their training currency, competency and work history. Senior Command agreed to move the Navy Management Diary prototype into production with a roll out to Navy units scheduled to commence mid-2014.
