SSE Meeting 9

INCOSE UK Service Systems Engineering Meeting 21 July 2014

Held atQinetiQ London

Attendees

Peter Mason, Rachel Freeman, John Davies, Stephen Ashlin

Characteristics of Services

Currently around 40 characteristics has been established, from literature, workshops and discussions. This has been found too large to be useful. They have been grouped into six categories: Lifecycle, Contract, Risk, Regulation, Relationships, Technical, Properties.

Some of these are too general to be useful so a set of key characteristics, some very specific and some more general is needed. The following set were discussed:

• Risk: in Development
• Risk: in meeting Performance target
• Contract/agreement – is` it Novel/Complex, or Standard/Simple
• Cost of Development
• Cost of Provision
• Regulation – is it onerous or standard
• Relationships – are they important or not
• Technical Requirements – are they Complex/Complicated or Simple
• Technical Solution – is it Complex or Simple
• Properties of the Solution, in particular
  • Human Factors
  • Flexibility of Scale
  • Flexibility of Scope
  • Integrity
  • Availability

A ‘simple’ set of Services has been used to evaluate the Characteristics

• Police
• Security Services
• Health
• Car Servicing
• Facilities Management
• Banking/ Financial Services
• Retail
• Consultancy/Customer Friend
• Technical Support/repair
• Universities
• Communications
• Building
• Utilities
• Information Services

Some correlations have been found between Characteristics – on the basis of them being shared between different Services, and between Services on the basis of the importance of the different characteristics.

It was agreed that this set of services does not really reflect INCOSE UK interests and we should look to use a better set.

Use Cases and Template

Problems found with using the standard template for real Use Cases and making it useful for the current work. It was agreed that we need a template that brings out the Service aspects of the Use Cases, rather than a standard template designed for engineering development. Following discussion the Use Case content was proposed to be:

• Title
• Diagram
• Description
• Values against Key Characteristics
• Stakeholder map and values
• ‘Orientation’ as in: Product oriented, Use oriented, Result oriented
• Lifecycle and Cost: such as a graph of cost against time with key milestones: development start and end, operation start and end, contract/agreement date.

General Issues

The following issues were felt to be requiring thought, investigation, effort:

• Lifecycles, costs and contract/agreement
• Flexibility in Scope and flexibility in Size
• Humans as Part of the Service and Humans as Users of the Service
• Stakeholders: Consumer, Customer, Provider, Regulator, Non- beneficiaries
• Product/Service continuum – as an ‘introduction/way in’ to Services.
• Orientation: Product, Use, Result.
• Related programmes.

Outputs and Formats

The outputs of this work will be a Report, Presentations, Z-Guide saying what is Service Systems Engineering (free access), Omega guides saying ‘how to do it’ (limited access)

Report

To cover the main areas we have looked at. Including topics on: Why, What, Characteristics, use Cases, Background Reading, related programmes, how to apply. Each topic could be from half to four pages long.

Strawman Z Guide

We will draft a Z Guide to see what it could look like. eg.

• Front as what is SSE and why
• Centre as picture (maybe Venn diagram or Product/Service continuum, with Boxes for various aspects
• Back with links to further reading and short commentary
• Inner flap – maybe differences in emphasis between ‘Standard SE’ and ‘Services SE’

Presentation for ASEC14

We could use Strawman Z guide as basis plus slides on Characteristics and User Cases.

Sources of information

We are currently using the following:

Cambridge Services Alliance

We have an review of available documents, short overall commentary to be produced

INCOSE Handbook

We need to identify what is useful/can be applied

SEBok

We have summary/critique, short commentary to be produced

Work of core group members

For the next meeting following will be looked at:

• Steve A: Use Case Template, Use Cases
• Peter M: Summary of related programmes
• Rachel F: Check notes on Product/Service stuff, try Use Case Template, review Strawman Z Guide.
• John D: Send out slides on characteristics and groupings, Strawman Z Guide
• Andrew F: Review INCOSE Handbook – what applies to Services, what needs changing, what is missing, different emphasis for Services?

Date for next meeting:

8 September – if possible Rolls Royce at Bristol