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2020 08 12 Attended the INCOSE 2020 International Symposium, July – virtually!

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Last month, during Mon-Wed 20-22 July 2020, I attended the INCOSE 2020 International Symposium. It has been scheduled to be hosted in Cape Town in South Africa. The promotional informational information is still available here.

IS 2020 logo

Due to the international situation with the coronavirus, the event was held virtually. I’m not familiar with the hosting technology, but it certainly worked well for me. The schedule over the three days included three parallel tracks, with live presentations of several keynotes, 5 panels, various invited content and over 50 paper presentations. The formal schedule was complemented by INCOSE Cafe sessions to attempt to help the informal networking, always a big feature of conventional symposia.

So to us, what went well and what not so well?

What went well?

Broadly speaking it was a great success, with lots of content on various familiar topics including: system architecting, MBSE, requirements engineering and process tailoring. More unusual content attracted further topic tags: machine leaning and Artifical Intelligence; circular economy; cyber security; asset management. The online schedule enabled one to navigate by day, time, session and track. One could then click to join the online session. Attendees were able to download both the papers and (in most cases) the presentation material. Even after the symposium ended it was possible to view the Q&A trail and to ask additional questions. It was also possible to provide presentation feedback.

One particular feature we liked during the sessions was the concurrent windows into attendees, chat and Q&A. The chat in particular made it possible to ask ‘the audience’ dumb questions (like “what is that acronym?”), which would never be easily possible in a live venue.

And not so well?

What went not so well? In our view, very little. One very minor annoyance of the hosting technology was when you went back to ‘schedule’ it put you back to beginning of Day 1; it would have been more useable (IMHO) to have gone back to the place in the schedule of the session / track that was just in.

Oh and of course, missed the opportunity to miss visit the beautiful South Africa thanks to coronavirus – still at least we saved on travel expenses!

In conclusion…

All in all, the 2020 International Symposium was brilliant virtual conference! Watch this space to further posts highlight some of our own favourites from this year’s IS!

2018 08 17 Systems Approaches in Healthcare wins award at INCOSE IS

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We presented at earlier version of this paper at the INCOSE UK Meeting in November 2017 (see here). This was subsequently updated by ourselves and our co-authors into a 15 page paper and was presented at the INCOSE International Symposim (IS) in July 2018 in Washington DC.

We were proud to find out just ahead of the Symposium that the paper won a Best Paper on Biomed / Healthcare / Social Services award. Thanks to Holistem co-authors Alan Harding (BAE Systems), Gary Smith (Airbus) and Fran Beck (NHS) for their contributions. Special thanks to Fran for hosting the workshops, bringing together a great community of healthcare professionals, and providing an opportunity to apply systems engineering and systems thinking approaches within a healthcare context.

You can download the full paper here.

2017 12 15 Summary of healthcare engagement in 2016

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Holistem has facilitated during 2016-2017 a successful series of workshops applying systems thinking and systems engineering techniques to the healthcare domain. This facilitation was done with with other systems engineering colleagues from INCOSE UK. A summary of the approach and the outcomes of this engagement, presented at the INCOSE UK ASEC (Autumn Systems Engineering Conference) in November 2017, can be found here.

If you are interested in more information, please contact us.

2017 10 05 Systems engineering, systems thinking and healthcare

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During the last year Holistem engaged in the UK, via INCOSE, the International Council on Systems Engineering (website), to apply systems approaches to organisational improvement in the healthcare domain. Applying systems approaches in healthcare is not a ‘new thing’ but there is certainly a growing momentum to apply such approaches and the value of such approaches is recognized both within and outside the NHS. The results of a joint activity between healthcare professional and the Royal Academy of Engineering is reported in the publication “Engineering Better Care”, available here; INCOSE was also involved.

Holistem’s engagement to apply systems approaches successfully with a number of healthcare organisations is being reported in a presentation and paper at this year’s INCOSE UK Annual Systems Engineering Conference (ASEC), details of the conference and programme available here. Our approach and outcomes are reported in Session 1.2. If you are interested in the topic, hopefully we’ll see you there – at the time of writing, registration is currently open.

2016 09 09 At INCOSE IS 2016 Conference

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Holistem attended INCOSE (www.incose.org) International Symposium 2016 conference in Edinburgh in July, our personal favourite items include the following:

Sat 16/7 attended Systems Thinking in Healthcare. Some great insights into how to apply systems thinking to address the challenges encountered in organisations such as the UK NHS.

Sun 17/7 attended workshop hosted by Peter Tuddenham on ‘systems literacy’. Most significant outcome: became aware of the considerable materials that have been produced in recent years to characterise recognisable ‘systems’ aspects in a number of different sectors. For instance, see the Ocean Literacy material at http://oceanliteracy.wp2.coexploration.org/ocean-literacy-framework/navigation/. Fascinating!

Holistem organised and chaired a Panel session, “SysML in support of MBSE is easy to learn: discuss”, with four panellists represented a range of stakeholders relating to the adoption of SysML as a systems modelling language in an MBSE context. The session was well attended, led to some lively Q & A and came to a consensus ‘answer’: “yes and no”!. More to follow…

As to a few other Panels or Papers we particularly liked:

1.2 Panel: “Systems of Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet-of-Things”, chaired by Judith Dahmann of MITRE, gave in our view a really useful insight into the scope, interrelationships and overlaps of these three very topical systems domains.

4.1.1 Paper: “Introducing MBSE by using Systems Engineering Principles”, a joint paper by Saab and Syntell, gave a candid account of the challenges, pragmatic approach and successes to adoption of MBSE in a large organisation. This paper also won a Best Paper award.

4.1.2 Paper: “Getting Started with MBSE in Product Development”, was well-placed in the agenda to follow the previous paper, as it also focussed on pragmatic approach to supporting MBSE. The authors from Syncroness Inc. explained that, for their organisation’s projects, they did not need the full richness and complexity that might be implied by the metamodels underlying enterprise architecture (e.g. DODAF) and SysML schemas. So their approach was to go back to basics, understand what concepts and relationships they really needed to support the SE ‘V’ lifecycle and full traceability, and mapping to diagrams. They then built up their own ‘essential’ schema. We love it!

All in all, IS 2016 was an excellent conference, thanks to the organisers who did an outstanding job!

2015 11 23 At INCOSE ASEC 2015

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Holistem attended (and presented at) the INCOSE (www.incose.org) UK Autumn Conference, the ASEC2015 (https://incoseonline.org.uk/ASEC2015/general_information.aspx?catid=ASEC_Information). Many great presentations were included, our particular highlights included the following:

  • A rerun of an INCOSE International Symposium Best Paper award paper. Rolls Royce had previously published on the identification of design issues, both when they were detected versus when they should have been detected actual, versus phases of lifecycle. This latest paper gave a fascinating insight into the strengths of particular character profiles versus roles as designers or reviewers, AND how appropriate matching of these character types could radically transform effectiveness of design and review teams.
  • Presenters from the Changan UK automotive company R&D centre in Birmingham presented on their ambitious approach to the adoption of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to address their business improvement strategy.
  • The Mactaggart brothers (one firmly in the systems engineering camp, the other firmly in Rugby Union) presented an application of systems engineering to give insight to the Ruby Union’s organisation (and by implication, process) for developing upcoming rugby talent through to England-level players. It appears the analysis has led to insight of value to the organisation: “this is the first time we have seen all of this on one page”.
  • Finally, there was a presentation in the INCOSE UK MBSE Working Group on the application of MBSE to the Great West Main Line electrification project, yielding much clarity and insight to a complex project and complex web of development contracts.

An excellent 2-days of systems engineering presentations!