SSE Meeting 4

Held at QinetiQ, Farnborough.

Attendees

Peter White, Glenn Panter, Peter Mason, Rachel Freeman, Andrew Farncombe, John Davies, Stephen Ashlin, Laura Mullin

Use Cases for Service Provision

Four Use Cases describing services and their provision were presented. These led into discussions on the services, issues with their provision and their characteristics. The Services were from the Defence, Transport and Education sectors and covered analysis of service provision, development and delivery of a service and provision of services under a long-term facilities management contract.

LTPA Long-Term Provisioning Agreement

This contract is between MOD and QinetiQ to deliver Test & Evaluation and training support services to the UK military. It is a 25 year contract with a five year review period. It involves maintaining 17 sites across the UK and providing the contractual means for MOD and non-MOD consumers to access T&E and training support services.This is an example of a service-based, long-term, high cost service contract with a small number of consumers.

Complex Trials carried out under the LTPA

Individual trials carried out for MoD and/or UK Defence Industry via the LTPA are individual services. In particular, trials containing more complex elements which require development of capability in addition to that provided by the LTPA can be thought of as individual bespoke services. This is an example of a service-based (with an element of goods provided), short-term, medium cost service contract with a very small number of consumers.

Energy Management in Schools

This Service is a sub-set of a wider Facilities Management Service being provided for a large secondary school. There are major issues with understanding the various stakeholders involved in the service and what they require. There is a lack of awareness, interest and communication of the way these various needs conflict. With the changing curriculum and need for major increases in ICT provision there is a need for an effective managed change process within the Service Agreements, which is missing.

Transport for London Cycle Hire Scheme

This Service, to provide bicycles for hire on the streets of London, has been designed, implemented, and rolled out. It is currently operating successfully across central London. The approach was to use the company’s standard Systems Engineering methodology, used successfully on other projects, and understand what was needed in addition. The main differences found were:

• The importance of KPIs Key performance indicators (Service orientation).
• An emphasis on People (delivering the service) for example the provision of a Call centre.
• A huge emphasis on Business Processes and Operational procedures
• The requirement to apply RFST Ready for Service Testing – in addition to traditional FAT and SAT.
• Tool usage to capture, manage and trace these aspects to Requirements

Methods for engineering and analysing Systems and Services.

A listing of methods used in systems studies were presented and briefly discussed. The Services work needs more than the ‘hard systems’ approach as the operational, business process and human aspects are important. Much of this work has been done at the University of Hull [[1]] – covering major strands of systems thinking, including general system theory, operational research, cybernetics, soft systems thinking and complexity theory

Characterisation of Services

A number of ‘example’ Services have been characterised using an initial set of variables. Excel has been used to provide visualisation and analyse correlations between Services – where Services exhibit similar characteristics, and between variables. It is expected that there will be some correlation of variables – for example Services that have major Dependability requirements will have KPIs that are difficult to meet, and have relatively high costs. So three variables – Dependability, KPIs (or QoS) and Development Cost could be closely correlated. It is expected that the on Use Cases will identify the need for other variables and feed numbers into the analysis. It was agreed to add ’size of enterprise needed to deliver service’ as a variable. It is expected (or hoped) that correlations will enable services to be identified that require the same additional engineering approaches, and for the number of variables that need to be considered to be reduced. Cambridge Services Alliance have identified 76 potential characteristics of complexity in services; these should be examined for their applicability to the characterisation of services.

Related work and documents

These were collected and discussed during the meeting. Moved to a separate page Related_Work_and_Documents.

Plan for ASEC 2013

Following discussion the following draft plan emerged:

• Presentation (20 mins)
  • Overview
  • Why do Service Systems Engineering
  • Case Studies and issues
• Workshop (20 mins)
  • Audience participation: discussion of similar cases other cases and more issues
• Presentation (20 mins)
  • Systems Methodologies – why standard approach is lacking
  • Characterisation – what it is and sample results
• Workshop (20 mins)
  • Audience Work sheet with list of Variables and table for audiences’ Services.
  • Audience to identify additional Services and Variables and discussion
• Wash-up (10 mins)
  • Why – again
  • What we are doing – again
  • What we have got from this session
  • Invite to join us – on web-site
  • Thanks to the audience

Next Meeting

Physical meeting: 27th November at UCL (Laura Mullin to confirm)