SSE Meeting 3

(by conference call): 9th September 2013

Attendees

Andrew Farncombe (acting Chair in the absence of Tony Johnson) John Davies (Secretary) Stephen Ashlin (QinetiQ) Iain Cardow (Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace) Rachel Freeman (Sustain Ltd/Bristol University) Peter Mason (Welwyn Business Services) Laura Mullin (UCLse)

Introduction

Thanks to Stephen Ashlin (QinetiQ) for setting up the conference call. Holding the meeting by conference call so early in the lifetime of the SSE was an experiment. Its use was reviewed at the end of the meeting. Iain Cardow (RR) had volunteered use of a WebEX facility prior to the meeting, This allows screen sharing to aid discussion. Unfortunately this offer had got lost for this meeting, but would be good for future ‘virtual meetings’.

Use Cases/Case Studies

There was a lively discussion over the content of ‘use cases’, which were identified as a way of structuring case studies – leading to understanding the engineering needed to develop and operate Services. The following points emerged:

• Use Cases need to contain a clear articulation of desired business outcomes, how the outcomes can be delivered as a service and how they can be verified.
• Use Cases need to include supplier and user/procurer perspectives - possibly Stakeholder Maps and Stake-holder analysis.
• The life-cycle of the Service needs to be defined
• Contracting for services is important, in particular those services that are delivered over a long period of time, may be contracted several times over that period
• The time dimension is important ie how the service aspect changes over time
• Need to show how to manage changes to desired outcomes and requirements over time.
• The list of characterisation variables may be useful in identifying which aspects of a service need to be addressed.

Characterisation

Ideas on identifying a number of Services and Characterisation Variables were put forward and discussed. The following points were made:

• Characterisation is the identification of a number of Characteristics of Services, identifying what is a low and high score for that Characteristic, and scoring each Service for each Characteristic.
• Characterisation is aimed at identifying groups of Services that are similar and need the same engineering to develop and operate them. Of these groups some will be of interest to INCOSE and some will not.
• 'Characterisation’ is not the same as ‘Use Cases’ but they should complement each other.
• There is a branch of Statistics called Multivariate Analysis that can be used to analyse Characterisation data. It is used extensively in Medical/Population research for example, to groups of people at risk of contracting certain diseases based on their age, height, weight, blood pressure, life-style, etc.
• For small data sets the analysis can be done in MSExcel.
• The analysis can look at correlations and find Services that are similar, based on the characteristics, and characteristics that are similar – based on the set of Services considered.
• The set of Characteristics may ‘mature’ over time as work on the Use Cases progresses the importance of certain Characteristics becomes apparent.

ASEC13 90mins slot

People were asked to bring their ideas on the ASEC13 90mins slot to the next meeting.

• It was generally thought that it would be good to broaden the set of people/types of business feeding into the group. Ideas on how to achieve this in terms of the audience/participation at ASEC13 should be brought to the next meeting.

Agreed Actions

• Send out a refined list of characterisation variables and service types, which may be useful for individual use cases/case studies. (John Davies)
• Produce Outline/Draft Use Cases/Case Studies: (Steve Ashlin, Peter Mason, Iain Cardow, Rachel Freeman)

Review of Conference Call

It was agreed that the meeting had been useful. Normally conference calls work best once a group is established and a regular reporting structure has become established. For a creative meeting in which ideas are being generated and discussed, conference calls may not be ideal. In the circumstances, however, this call seemed to work reasonably well. If possible, WebEX should be used for future ‘virtual meetings’.

Date of next meeting

Thursday, 3rd November, Qinetiq, Farnborough; need to register for this event via Web-site