The Autumn Assembly  2005 Programme

Session 1: Peter Lister - Safety Engineering, and Systems Engineering Applied to Safety – the same thing?

• How can Safety Engineering assure that a system is safe if it only considers what are deemed to be safety related issues?

• Is it possible to develop a safe system without applying Systems Engineering throughout?

Is it costing more than it should if Systems and Safety Engineering are not working together efficiently?

Hear the background to these questions and views from a range of SE practitioners (Rail, Defence, Industrial, Aerospace) and make up your own mind. Participate in the debate that will follow the presentations, and help us to consider whether the Systems Engineering process should address safety more explicitly. Is there an opportunity to enhance the business case for Systems Engineering by reducing the spiralling costs of safety assessment? What should INCOSE be doing to integrate these two processes? Should we start up a Working Group to address these issues?

The exact line-up has still to be confirmed, but we are expecting presenters from Atkins, Tube Lines, Frazer- Nash, Rail Safety & Standards Board, Airbus and Praxis. After the presenters have set out their points of view, there will be an open discussion during which views and questions from the floor will be addressed by the session team.

Session 3A: Jon Holt, Brass Bullet - Systems Engineering Standards where are we, what is next?

Standards, love them or hate them, are an integral part of any systems engineers life. They vary from international standards (such as ISO 15288), to industry standards (such as MoDAF in the defence industry) to in-house standards, processes, procedures and guidelines.

The complexity of these standards can be very intimidating with the overall page-count providing no real indication on the ease of comprehensibility of the standard and with the different meanings and inconsistencies that seem to permeate many of today’s standards.

So why do we need them? Is there a need for standardisation and, if so, should the use of such standards be seen as an overhead or a benefit?

The main aims are to:

• promote discussion on the value of standards
• identify key standards for systems engineers
• highlight implementation issues
• discuss success/horror stories

The format will be fifteen-minute, soap-box style presentations.

The session will be hosted by Dr. Jon Holt (Brass Bullet Ltd) who is actively involved in the modeling, analysis and definition of standards at all levels – he sits on IST/15 which is responsible for all software and systems engineering standards in the UK and is the author of ‘a pragmatic guide to process modelling’.

Several standards will be used as the focal points for discussion, including ISO 15288 – systems engineering life cycle management and the MoDAF. All participant will receive a beginner’s guide to systems standards that uses ISO 15288 as an example standard.

Session 3B: Dr Barbara Jones, Pi Technology - Systems Engineering applied in the Automotive Industry.

This session aims to look at "developing systems engineering skills effectively - in the automotive industry" where it will address what is the need, how is it being met at the moment, can it be improved and if so how.

Amongst others in the automotive industry senior managers from BMW, Jaguar LandRover, Leyland Trucks, and Visteon UK have been invited to participate in this session.

The format is expected to consist of a brief status view from each of the invited participants leading into a working group get together to search for a way forward to make the automotive systems engineering design process more efficient both for the OEM's and the Tier 1's. It is hoped that this will be the first steps towards effective automotive systems engineering standards.

The Evening Dinner at the Henry Ford College and an after dinner session by Peter Fryer of trojanmice.

Our dinner will be in the Henry Ford College at 7.30 . It needs to be booked as an item on the registration form and will be complete with pre-dinner drinks, and wine. We are very pleased to have Peter Fryer of trojanmice ltd to entertain us after dinner.

An entertaining, informative, and interactive after dinner session by Peter Fryer of trojanmice, which is a fresh lively look at the ways we run our organisations. He will challenge much of what we consider to be the fundamentals of running an organisation by exposing the many erroneous assumptions we unknowingly make.

Session 2: Allen Fairbairn - Competences, Certification and the role of Academia and the Engineering Institutions.

A hot topics for systems engineers on which nothing much seems to have been happening over the last decade.

Now, suddenly, we have an International certification programme – being trialled in the US – and a UK based competency framework issued by members of the UKAB (INCOSE UK Advisory Board) comprising representatives from our major defence and aerospace companies and others.

For some, the issue now is simply the route map to a full certification programme in the UK which has industrial, academic and institutional support, using progress to date as the basis. For others, the discipline of SE is not sufficiently mature and/or it is too industry specific to be setting out a definitive competency framework. Meanwhile pressure grows for some form of certification, not just from individual SE’s but also from Institutions considered to be the normal “providers” of certification, some of whom may even have a duty to fulfil in respect of certification requests in general.

What is clear is that a lot of organisational progress has been made recently and individual system engineers may feel that they have not been properly consulted. The half day session at this year’s Autumn Assembly is a first step to redress this balance. High profile speakers will be attending this session and invited to contribute to a wide ranging debate.

Heinz Stoewer, INCOSE’s International President, will let us have the official INCOSE view; Hillary Sillitto INCOSE UK’s President can bring us right up to date; Stuart Arnold, the IEE/INCOSE UK link man can tell us the IEE’s position; INCOSE UKAB members will be on hand to describe what they have done so far and what is now planned for their framework document; Members of UK academia involved with SE will also be present and prepared to give ‘their point of view.

But this will not be a session dominated by the great and the good, with the opportunity for “ordinary” members only to venture the odd question for 5 minutes or so at the end. Also present, we hope, will be a large number of UK members prepared to contribute – at length if necessary - with their own considered, views. To give some structure to the debate, the full morning period will be broken down into sessions, with a break roughly half way through, but the form and content of the sessions will be determined by submissions made to me prior to the debate by members. As chairman and moderator for this particular subject at the AA, I welcome approaches from any member who wants to speak at the event or, if anyone cannot make the event, I will arrange for their views to be presented. This is a grass roots review of a subject of great importance both to members and their employers. My aim is to ensure that a wide range of views is presented, each subject only to a basic sanity check, and that we establish some broad basis of agreement for the way ahead.

E-mails to allen.fairbairn@btinternet.com or telephone 01303 850255. Please don’t leave it until the last few days before the event. Do something NOW while it’s fresh in your mind! Do have a look at the INCOSE and INCOSE UK web sites and read what you can find on this subject. There is now a lot of material out there, including the UKAB framework document on the UK website.

This year the UK Chapter launched the initially-titled “Bart Simpson Guide to Systems Engineering” project, now renamed “Z1”. The Z1 leaflet has been published and has received an enthusiastic response. It is hoped that it will be the first of a series of simple and useful 1-page documents, to promote and explain effective and useful systems engineering.

This session concentrates on three topics of key interest to many of our members:

• SE that works for SME’s - Mike Sussman
• The value of systems engineering Paul Davies
• Tailoring Systems Engineering – how much SE is enough? – Hazel Woodcock

Each theme lead will prepare a skeleton or “straw man” leaflet in advance for others to critique, and give a short minute presentation of their topic, identifying what they see as the key issues and some alternative ways of presenting them. A panel discussion will follow, to get coherence across the group and in particular to get a degree of consensus on format and layout. This is an opportunity for the minority who did not like the Z1 layout to show that their ideas are better!

We will then split into smaller groups, one or two per key topic (or some groups may choose to tackle another topic of agreed to be of value). Each group will debate the best way to present its topic, key issues to be addressed, and key points to be made in the 1-page leaflet.

A rapporteur from each group will then provide feedback on their conclusions and recommendations in plenary session, with opportunity for further discussion.

The discussion will be captured, the different approaches compared and contrasted, and if there is sufficient interest, signups for small teams to produce improved draft leaflets will be offered. All participants will benefit from this rare opportunity to share with and learn from fellow practitioners from outside their normal “domain”.