The Autumn Assembly  2004 Programme

This session will introduce the current activities of the Working Groups and Local Groups, and invite comment, suggestions and participation. Attendees are encouraged to develop Group activities further after the close of the day’s sessions, maybe even in the bar! The new Communications & Membership Committee (CMC) chair will elicit opinions from the floor on future strategy.

09:30 Introduction from INCOSE UK Technical Chair Dipesh

09:45 UK WG’s and their relationship to INCOSE International WG’s - INCOSE (international) Technical Board Chair - Samantha Brown BAE Systems

10:15 Region 3 (Europe) Requirements Working Group - Colin Ingamells Airbus

10:30 Refreshment break

11:00 Stevenage, Bristol, and London Local Groups present their current activities and plans.

11:30 MOD Smart Acquisition Improvement Working Group - Duncan Kemp MOD - DDSA

11:40 The INCOSE Technical Vision 2020, and our Future Strategy - Hillary Sillitto INCOSE UK President-Elect

11:50 Communications and Membership Committee - Simon Hutton.

The aim of this session is to examine what ‘Risk Management’ means to different practitioners. Is there a difference between perception of risk by a customer and a supplier? By a Systems Engineer, a Project Manager or an Accountant? Does the ‘optimum’ risk mitigation strategy depend on your point of view?

Why is Risk always ‘Someone Else’s Problem’, or just goes unacknowledged? What barriers are there to introduction of a Risk Management process, and can we overcome them?

13:30 Risk 101 - How to Use Risk Management to leverage Systems Engineering into a Project - Paul Davies, Thales

We start with a lightning overview of best practice texts, and look at typical examples from a working project. Some rules of thumb for turning technical risk identification ("what might go wrong?") into financial terms are expounded. The concepts of pre- and post-mitigation risk are presented, along with the key assessment of return on investment of risk mitigation activities. The links with Project Planning and accounting follow, and finally we look at the introduction of change towards team ownership of the risk management process.

13:55 Design Spirals in Aircraft Design - Risk Mitigation against Mismatches in Requirements and Lowering Development Costs - Carren Holden (BAE Systems)

This presentation addresses the issue of how design spirals help to avoid so called "crunch time", when building a complicated platform such as an aircraft. "Crunch time" is when the unexpected happens during a design, such as discovering that the fuel tank volume is too small to hold the fuel required for the various missions. Opportunities provided by the design spiral will be explored, for progressive and efficient optimisations over ever more refined trade-space opportunities.

14:20 Risk Management Applied to Mega Projects – Derek Price, Parsons Brinkerhoff Ltd.

This Presentation will focus on Project Risk Management applied to Mega Projects. A snapshot of application of project risk management to a large construction project; a Major Airport expansion; UK Rail projects; and small projects

State of the art in infrastructure business:

• Use of Quantified Risk Assessment to determine variance in costs & schedule

• Tool usage

• Relationship with other project issues  (Value Management, Systems Engineering, information risk management)

• A view on how well this is applied in reality

 Key Issues:

• What makes a good risk management system?

• Are project organisations designed to deal with risk well?

• Is the infrastructure world any different to defence & aerospace?

14.45 Refreshment break

15:10 The Judge, the Social Worker and the Policeman - How the MoD governs Interoperability risks - Gordon Woods (MOD-DPA)

Ensuring the interoperability, or at least reducing the risk of integration, of complex MoD Systems is a challenging task.

Projects have to balance their own costs and programme against possible delays to in-service dates due to protracted integration issues. One of the initiatives undertaken by the Integration Authority has been the formation of the Interoperability and Compliance Assurance (IOCA) team who work with projects to achieve a sagacious outcome.

The effectiveness of a twin approach of Interoperability Assurance and Compliance Assurance, and how it can be applied to other industry sectors will be demonstrated. Examples will be given of real issues and problems, together with the mechanisms by which these have been managed and resolved.

15:35 Requirements, Risk, Project Duration and Acquisition Approaches (Pure Off the Shelf, COTS, Bespoke and Collaborative-Bespoke) - Duncan Kemp (MOD-DDSA)

This presentation will discuss the following:-

• Integration, performance, cost and time
• Delivering capability through equipment and non-equipment approaches

After outlining the basic issues, Duncan will lead an interactive session looking at:-

• The impact on defence acquisition
• The impact on individual companies
• The implications for systems engineering and systems engineers

16:25 Floor Debate

• Employer attitudes to acknowledgement and active management of Risk.
• Analyse barriers to implementation.
• Can we produce a simple guide to the benefits of Risk Management for the practising Engineer?

Systems engineering trends, vision and business benefit - Hillary Sillitto (Thales)

The presentation reviews some of the latest ideas shaping possible futures of systems engineering and the business benefits it delivers.

It identifies three key business benefits of systems engineering and show that delivering them requires a "whole system approach" observing the principles of the system value cycle, the generic system model, and the 6 lines of development. It proposes that such an approach will deliver programme, product and stakeholder success, but only when commercial, operational, technical, programme and political architectures are adequately aligned, and an effective decision-making process is established.

Systems Engineering as a business improvement initiative - Mike Sussman (TDSi), Simon Hutton (3SL)

There has been considerable effort during recent years to improve business effectiveness through the application of formal project management methods and techniques, aiming to deliver systems that give customers what they need, within budget and on time. This presentation examines how a systems engineering approach can add value to a large manufacturing project when introduced as a business improvement initiative. Based on a case study, The implementation, benefits and pitfalls of the approach are described, with an assessment of the ability of systems engineering to reduce project costs and risk whilst improving customer satisfaction.
 

The map-route for adaptation and further development of Systems Engineering processes (e.g. ISO 15288) is now well established. However, the key issue of the template for the Systems Engineering competency framework has received much less attention in comparison. The need to evaluate the expertise of the SE practitioner(s) against the intellectual demands of complex programmes and projects must be addressed. The inputs of technical, managerial and business skills, which must be deployed towards successful project delivery to the customer, have to be managed prudently. Especially in large organisations involved in the delivery of ranges of large complex projects, the integration of skills and other resources cannot be managed efficiently without a sound template for the acquisition, development and deployment of skill sets.
 

Effective requirements engineering in a multidisciplinary and multi-skilled project environment presents problems of achieving process consistency whilst achieving sufficient levels of requirement ownership. A centralised requirements function is well placed to develop good quality requirements but may not achieve the "buy-in" of the wider team.

The Future Aircraft Carrier project (CVF) has addressed this problem by developing the concept of an Extended Requirements Team in which requirements specialists are embedded in the key project discipline areas.

The successes and difficulties with this organisational structure will be discussed. The need to transform the organisation as the project matures through its lifecycle will also be described.

"Bart Simpson’s Guide to Systems Engineering" - To identify and develop those aspects of systems engineering that can be used effectively by individuals and small teams, and to explain and sell systems engineering to those with a short attention span "school kids, university students, CEOs and politicians".
 

This session continues the ‘value-added’ theme and assesses how frameworks and modelling techniques can be adapted to improve system definition.

Integrated Architectural Framework for Requirements Modelling - Robbie Forder and Kim Hillier (Hi-Q Systems Ltd)

The systems engineering community, following several initiatives by INCOSE see Model Driven Design as key to the future of systems engineering. There has also been much interest about supporting requirements definition and derivation using various modelling approaches. The Department of Defence Architectural Framework (DoDAF) defines an integrated architecture that is highly suited for this purpose. This presentation sets out to define a vision of an integrated architecture that supports the requirements at both user and system levels, while allowing different modelling techniques to be used for the same architectural products.

Generating Interface Specifications through modelling - Matthew Hause (Artisan)

The modelling of systems must be more than just drawing pictures. building a model with an underlying database, interface specifications can be generated, performance modelling can take place, and alternatives can be explored. presentation will look at case studies in different industries to demonstrate how this has been achieved in practice. A C4ISR (MoDAF, DoDAF) profile will be explored. Finally, SysML extensions to UML 2.0 will be reviewed to show how they have added even more capabilities.
 

2004 has seen the introduction of the revolutionary tilting trains, the Pendolino Class 390 and Vogager Class 221, into service in tilt mode, running between London and Manchester, Crewe and Birmingham.

Session will use the personal perspectives of members of the West Coast team to case study the issues of Verification and Validation of a very large infrastructure project. session team will set the scene, talk about the tools and processes used and describe how these were rolled out to the programme, identifying some of the issues that were raised, and how they were managed.

West Coat Mainline overview - Brian Halliday

Tools & processes - Simon Wills

Rolling out V&V - Kevin Tarling

Final Panel Discussion and Closing Remarks