SSE Meeting 2

Service Systems Engineering Working Group Meeting 2
15 July 2013, Basingstoke

Attendees

Tony Johnson (Chair), Andrew Farncombe (INCOSE UK Technical Director), Stephen Ashlin, Glenn Panter, Iain Cardow, Rachel Freeman, Laura Mullin, John Davies (Secretary), Steven Turner, Peter White

Organisation of the Working Group

• Core Members will be members of the group that attend the meetings and contribute work to the group.
• Meetings will be bi-monthly or quarterly (based on experience of other working groups). Members volunteered to check if they could host meetings at the following locations: Basingstoke, Bournemouth University, Bristol, London, Farnborough. It was felt that having meetings at a number of different venues would be a good thing. In addition some meetings can be held ‘on-line’, but that some face-to-face meetings will be needed.
• Outputs will be produced in MSWord, Excel, Powerpoint and uploaded to the Group site on the INCOSE UK site and available through the Group Wiki pages.
• Access to the Wiki will be Read/Write to core team members and Read only to INCOSE UK members.
• John Davies agreed to act as secretary and to start using the Wiki.
• Other members that need help with using the Wiki should contact John Davies.

Review of material and discussion of experiences

• The slides presented at Meeting 1 were run through. General themes running through all the presentations and a number of specific issues were identified and discussed.
• Members of the group shared experiences of delivering services within their business areas and what they had found that was different between delivering product and delivering services.
• These included:
  • Whole life, whole service contract/costs versus product development contract/costs. (Defence)
  • Major mismatch between lifetime of equipment and infrastructure, and period of operators contracts. (Rail Industry)
  • Use of Enterprise Architectures/Architecture Frameworks, TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) (Transport).

What is the Working Group going to do?

• The Scope of the Working Group needs to be explored and defined.
• In general it is to meet the needs of the UKAB which is centred on Defence/Aerospace and Transport; where previous projects had delivered products and there is movement to deliver services supported by products.
• It is expected to identify parts of the standard systems engineering process that need to be the same and some that need to be different in order to deliver ‘services’ compared to delivering ‘products’.

How is the Work going to be done?

Following wide-ranging discussions a number of areas were identified

• Use Cases – given the range of businesses within the working group, can we produce a number of anonymised Use Cases that analyse the engineering and business activities that are needed to provide a service.
• World Views and Definitions: following in the footsteps of other Working Groups, can we use Soft Systems Methodology to identify World Views for Services to identify different uses of the term ‘Service’ by different groups (such as Providers, Users, Customers, IT); to identify which World Views are of interest to this group.
• Definitions of the key terms that need to be used to have a common understanding of what is being discussed.
• Characterisation of Services: given a varied set of services, are there a number of useful characteristics that can be used to ‘map’ them in some multidimensional space? Such as ‘number of clients’, ‘number of providers’, ‘pure product to pure service’, ‘time when the contract is agreed’. Based on such a set of characteristics, are there a correlations that services with similar characteristics have similar issues and require similar engineering solutions and would this provide a basis for generic guidance?
• Literature Search: to establish if and what is being done in this area by other groups so we can take advantage of their work and avoid re-inventing the wheel.
• Approaches/Methods: a number of approaches may be useful in this work. Some such as Use Case Analysis, Soft Systems Methodology, System Dynamics are known but there are others such as System of Systems Methodology, Value Engineering that may be useful.

Identified Tasks and Draft Plan

The group identified the following tasks and if and how they can be executed:

Item	Task	How/when/dependencies
1	Define possible characterisation variables of use case	Virtual discussion then develop variables
2	Define contents of a use case	Virtual discussion then develop use case template
3	Create use cases based on real examples (either by canvassing WG members, or by varying the variables	Issue invitations and distribute template
4	Create matrix and review characterisations	Face-to-face meeting, date tbd
5	Literature search for terminology and methodology (in enterprise methods?)	All
6	Create world views for supplier, user, & procurer perspectives	Dependent on 5
7	Get useful stuff out of Use Cases	Dependent on 3
8	Develop suitable approaches to SSE (bring it all together)	Dependent on tbd
9	Demonstrate approaches by application to use cases.	Dependent on tbd

INCOSE UK Annual Systems Engineering Conference ASEC-2013

SSE WG have a 90 minute slot planned in this two day conference. This could cover background, what we are aiming for, and a workshop type session. To be discussed at next meeting.

Future Meetings

Meeting	Date	Venue	Arrangements
3	9 September 2013	Phone-in meeting at 13-15.	Host and Phone # tbd
4	3 October 2013	Face-to-face meeting	Venue tbd possibly Bristol