SSE Meeting 12

INCOSE UK Service Systems Engineering Meeting 23 January 2015

Held at Rolls-Royce, Filton, Bristol

Attendees

Steve Ashlin, Iain Cardlow, Peter Mason(by phone), Andrew Farncombe, John Davies, Alan Crawford

Plan

Steve has updated the plan. Mostly to revise the timing to better fit with the effort/progress that is being achieved.

ASEC14

Poster

The Working Group Poster resulted in some interest and discussion, but has not resulted in extending the group membership.

Paper

Dan Wilson from Fraser-Nash presented a paper 'Applying Systems Engineering to Service Provision'. This takes a typical development project lifecycle process and adapts it for development of a service. It uses its own definition of 'Service' and hence area of interest, but is of some interest to this group.

Use Cases

A number of areas were discussed.

Terminology

We use the term 'Use Case' to mean a useful example described using a template. In some areas of engineering 'use Case' has a fixed meaning and fixed template. In our case we could use the term 'Case Study' or 'Real Example'.

Template

The current template is a list of areas of information to be covered. There may be more areas to add or some could be removed if not found to be useful. Currently most Use Cases use the template in MSPowerPoint, it may be better to have them in MSWord in the future.

Stakeholders

Stakeholder analysis and relationships are seen as important and should be covered within the template. They may be related to WorldViews - see below.

Rapid Acquisiton of Manufactured Services

Alan presenteed work he has been involved in over many years linked to the Royal Navy. This has been work to replace stockpiles of hardware spares with a service that supplies spares when they are needed. This has involved capturing and standardising engineering designs (CAD) and then going out to tender for manufacture (CAM) when the spare parts are needed. it was agreed this would make a good Use Case in a different area of business of interest to UKAB member companies.

World Views

This activity has not started, Alan volunteered to lead it. This work is seen as important as similar activities have proved vry useful in the Architectures and Capability Working Groups.

Definitions

Literature on Services has been reviewed to find useful definitions of services. Five types of definition have been found, examples of these are:

• Service: an intangible product: 'In economics, a service is an intangible commodity. That is, services are an example of intangible economic goods.' (Wikipedia)
• Service use: A Service is a set of actions or solutions that are put in place or are performed to provide a repeatable and consistent set of outcomes, deliverables, and performance for people, organizations, and systems that represent consumers or beneficiaries of such results. (Wikipedia)
• Service System: One or more of… an integrated set of elements, subsystems, or assemblies that accomplish a defined objective. (INCOSE Handbook v3.2)
• Service Specification: Services are an implementation-independent specification of a packaged element of functionality. (MoDAF)
• Service Agreement. An activity required by one or more users who have agreed on the terms of outcomes and quality of service without details to how it is provided. (SeBOK)

It is felt that these are all correct but are based on different aspects of a service. To understand these view and their relationships a set of definitions for terms connected with services has been used and extended to form an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD).

Further work will look to extend this to an Ontolgy that can be used to better understand the different aspects of services used in literature and are needed in particular situations.

Work of Core Group members

For the next meeting following will be looked at/developed:

• Steve A: Updates for Use Cases
• Peter M: Procurement Use Case
• Iain C: Engine provision Use Case
• John D: Develop Definitions work, Update Use Cases
• Andrew F: INCOSE Handbook v4
• Alan C: Develop RAMP Use Case, Preparation for WorldView work.

Date for next meeting:

23 March 2015 – QinetiQ, London.