INCOSE UK Service Systems Engineering Working Group

Meeting: 11 January 2016, QinetiQ, Farnborough

Attendees:

 Steve Ashlin, Alan Crawford, Andrew Farncombe, John Davies

The paper was presented by John Davies as a series of slides. Prior to the conference the written paper was updated to deal with all comments. It has now been submitted for IS2016.
A narrative was prepared to go with the slides and enable other team members to give the presentation elsewhere.

The poster was composed from the main slides used in the presentation. It included most of the diagrams but not the list of Definitions. It was useful during informal discussions.

There was a good reaction to the presentation both in the question and answer section of the talk and during coffee breaks.
The main comments were:
- There are now ISO standards to cover Service Management we had just quoted ITIL.
- There was support for the ERD/Service Definitions Diagram
- Some had looked at CMMI for Services and liked the way we had used it for the definitions
- A project manager from the Office for National Statistics - has a team developing software for handling statistics using SOA. He needs the Service Definition Diagram to get his engineers to realise there is more to it than just the SOA model and the ERD was showing other areas they needed to address.
- We were pointed to service-science.info [2] -which is largely supported by IBM - we need to look at.
- James Hillman from BAE Systems Warton has put something together for BAE Systems service portfolio and is willing to share with the WG
- There was a mood of 'hurry up and get it out' even in its current state. Leaving it later will reduce its value.
- there were specific contacts we need to get back to with regard to their own work and also roll-out of this work.

We reviewed the SEBoK content again and discussed whether providing material for this would be a useful or feasible output for the WG. Andrew thought the best first step to explore this was to approach Rick Adcock and determine the process for getting material included. The Wiki page has a box where suggested changes and content can be submitted.
Cambridge Services Alliance has its annual 2 day workshop on Making the Shift to Services on 16-17 March, which purports to offer service design tools to design new services and redesign existing ones. The cost is £1200 plus VAT (expensive) and the feeling from the discussion was that it did not offer value for money. It might, however, offer some tools and techniques that might be relevant. Currently there are no plans to attend, but if anyone knows someone who may attend it would be useful to make contact.
Discussion ensued on the next steps. The outcome was that we were in a position now to begin trying to apply some of our current knowledge to the Use Cases/case studies. This should include:
- SEBoK guidance (e.g. SSE stages)
- Service Definition Map

We reviewed the SEBoK content again and discussed whether providing material for this would be a useful or feasible output for the WG. Andrew thought the best first step to explore this was to approach Rick Adcock and determine the process for getting material included. The Wiki page has a box where suggested changes and content can be submitted.

Cambridge Services Alliance has its annual 2 day workshop on Making the Shift to Services on 16-17 March, which purports to offer service design tools to design new services and redesign existing ones. The cost is £1200 plus VAT (expensive) and the feeling from the discussion was that it did not offer value for money. It might, however, offer some tools and techniques that might be relevant. Currently there are no plans to attend, but if anyone knows someone who may attend it would be useful to make contact.

Discussion ensued on the next steps. The outcome was that we were in a position now to begin trying to apply some of our current knowledge to the Use Cases/case studies. This should include:
- SEBoK guidance (e.g. SSE stages)
- Service Definition Map

Two other potential sources of knowledge are James Hillman’s work and anything that can be identified from IBM’s Service Science community website.