The first thing I did was to look at groups/companies with established human factors or usability groups and find out what they did to become successful. Sources of information included Wiklund's book, various articles, some recent papers from CHI96, information on the web, monitoring of the UTEST listserv and comp.human-factors newsgroup, attendance at a CHI SIG focused on this very subject, and a LOT of talking to people (any human factors professional I could find, human factors professors, and human factors graduates I went to school with). From these sources of information, I developed the following list of qualities which seemed to recur consistently with successful human factors groups:
Each link provides a further discussion of the quality in question, and then discusses specific methods to develop that quality within your organization.
I feel that you can take an active role in developing most, if not all, of these qualities in your own situation. I also believe that developing or improving just a few of these qualities will substantially improve your situation. You don't need all of them to be successful. As a final note, these conclusions are based almost exclusively on anecdotal data. While not a statistically robust method, I believe these are valid methods.