SSE Meeting 10
INCOSE UK Service Systems Engineering Meeting 8 September 2014
Held at Rolls Royce, Filton, Bristol
Contents |
Attendees
Peter Mason, Iain Cardlow, Rachel Freeman, Andrew Farncombe, John Davies
Boundary of Service Systems Engineering
For this Working Group the aim is to provide useful information to our members and in particular the organisations within the CAB. These are mostly organisations that have been delivering products and are switching to providing services.
Scenario for providing services
A typical scenario could be:
- Customer: 'We keep buying products that are obsolete when they are delivered, we need the suppliers to own the kit and we only pay for its use when we need it. That way we will save costs and put all the risk onto the supplier. What we need our systems engineers to do is to define the Services we need so we can then contract our suppliers to provide them.'
- Supplier: 'Our customers are changing from procurement of equipment organisations to procurement of services organisations. If we want to stay in business we need to change to an organisation that provides sevices, not just equipment, but we still need it to be low risk and make a profit. We need our Systems Engineers to sort out what we need to bid for and deliver service contracts that are manageable and profitable.
Focus
The main focus is not to ask:
- is providing a service difficult
but to ask:
- what is different about providing a service
Issues with services and outsourcing
The Cambridge Services Alliance is largely concerned with the oursourcing of manufacturing. There is a management mantra that 'everything that can be outsourced should be outsourced'. This has caused major issues where a business' main design activities have been outsourced. e.g.
- IBM outsourced key design elements of the Personal Computer:
- Software to Microsoft,
- Hardware to Intel
- Microsoft and Intel are now much larger than IBM.
This has probably had more effect in the UK than other countries. For example was it such a good idea to sell off/outsource:
- Electricity supply to France
- Gas supply to Russia
- Automobile manufacture to Germany and Japan
- Aircraft wing manufacture to France
- Satellites to Germany
Areas where outsourcing may be seen as 'going wrong' are:
- PFI for hospitals - which may bankrupt the NHS
- IT in large organisations - where fit is still delivered that is out of date.
- Facilities management - where the consumer gets very poor service
Different approaches to/models for services
Within Rolls Royce,
- commercial airlines use a 'product lease' model,
- military customers use an 'availability' model.
Within MoD the objectives of servitising vary with layers of management:
- Whitehall - want minimum cost
- MoD - want minimum workforce
- Military command - want ability to deploy forces anywhere within short timescales
Engineering Effectiveness
There are different models for Engineering Effeectiveness such as:
- Observing the service being delivered, identifying all areas for improverment and then implementing them.
- Observing the service being delivered, identifying areas for improverment and then having a contract to implement some of them.
Service organisations may get paid a fixed percentage of the savings made by improvements.
Changes
There are normally two classes of changes:
- Class 1: requirements - the Customer changes what he wants, or the supplier got it wrong
- Class 2: technology - there is a new way of doing the same thing and it is adventageous to change.
For a Service -
- do we need to deal with Risk in a different way?
- do we need to deal with Changes in a diffferent way?
Characteristics of Services
Steve Ashlin had reviewed the proposed short set of Characteristics from the last meeting:
- Contract and Risk
- Customer Risk
- Consumer Risk
- Supplier Risk
- Planning, Execution and Cost
- Lifecycle
- Customer Cost
- Consumer Cost
- Supplier Cost
- Stakeholders
- Culteral Differences/Politics
- Contractual Concepts
- Technical
- Requirements
- Solution
- Human Factors
- Flexibility of Scale
- Flexibility of Scope
- Integrity
- Availability
It was agreed to try using these for the Use Cases.
Risk
It was felt that Risk could also be thought of as Technical Risk - as in a product, and Risk in Use - e.g. could another service overtake the one being supplied. Also there are risks related to composing services from other services over which there is no control and limited knowledge. This could be similar to use of COTS in products.
Use Cases and Template
Steve Ashlin has produced a template covering
- Description
- Top level description
- Is it product-oriented, use-oriented, results-oriented?
- Where does it sit in the CSA complexity space?
- Stakeholders and Relationships
- Lifecycle
- Lifecycle Processes
- Service System -technical
- Architecture of the system that delivers the service
- Is it highly dependent on people, technology or both?
- How flexible is it in terms of scale and scope?
- How resilient is it to changes in the environment (i.e. availability)?
In addition it was felt that 'Risk' should be covered and there should be a section on 'what is different' between what was done to provide a service against what would have been done to deliver a product in the same area.
Strawman Z Guide
A strawman 'Not a Z Guide' has been produced to show what a delivered Z Guide could look like. Most of the material is from referenced sources - only a bit from this Working Group.
Presentation for ASEC14
We could use Strawman 'Not a Z guide' as basis plus slides on Characteristics and User Cases. It is not clear who (if any) from the group will be at ASEC14.
Work of core group members
For the next meeting following will be looked at:
- Steve A: Use Cases with new template and Characteristics
- Peter M: Procurement use case
- Rachel F: Use Case
- Iain C: Use Case
- John D: Use Case: Find example from CSA
- Andrew F: Review INCOSE Handbook – what applies to Services, what needs changing, what is missing, different
emphasis for Services?
Date for next meeting:
3 November – QQ in London
