Birth of a System - London Cycle Hire

People in London can't have failed to notice the introduction of a new transport system lately - the Cycle Hire scheme. At the time of writing it's roughly a month into operations. For the uninitiated, there are roughly 400 docking stations around town, each housing up to 20-30 bikes. Registered users present their dongles, unhook a bike and pedal off. At the other end, the bike is re-docked, and, in a database somewhere, a small charge is incurred. (More intro, Guardian, July 2010)

Some things I've noticed, and some questions.:

It's obviously a multi-element system: Bikes, Docks, Terminals, Back End Data, Billing, Logistics. It's additionally part of TfL's great big system-of-systems. It's got the Mayor's Office paw prints on it, but clearly has been in the works for years. It couldn't have happened, without Paris and a few other prototypes. Expect to see more in big and small cities round the world soon.

There are sprawling requirements everywhere, not completely understood. Here, for example, is a story about an odd feature of the database that caused the owners to back-pedal on a particular function, the multi-key account. Is the development cycle capable of adapting to new, or recently clarified, requirements? My guess is that, oops, the database contract has been and gone, and this feature will sink, rather than be implemented properly.

The initial users are enthusiastic, communicative, and alive to the possibilities it offers. Has this resource been tapped into? The forumites all want to talk to TfL and Serco (for it is they) but I suspect the drawbridge is up.

Data! There are plenty of feeds that allow the growth of applications (and, of course, Apps) to entertain and inform the users. Here, for example, is Oliver O'Brien's visualisation of real-time Dock status. (Oliver is a GIS nerd at UCL, but I don't otherwise know him). Here's another of his, showing daily stats, for example. Note how system availalbility is about capacity of both Bikes and Docks at each end of the prospective journey. Unlike a little French town (Lyon? Paris?), London's scheme is being used a lot, in two daily peaks, by edge-to-centre commuters. Machines and Holes are both at a premium at critical times. Has all this been modelled?

The contractors and operators aren't saying much for now, other than "we are working on the best way to do things". Do they mean us?

Originally Posted at Systems Engineering on KTN _connect.

Invention by Design, Petroski

Henry Petroski, Invention by Design
Harvard,1996

Henry Petroski has written a number of books that cluster around the craft and process of engineering. This one sets out to illustrate the inventive process of engineering design. I picked it up hoping to know more about innovation in other fields than my own.

In the ten or so case studies presented, the theme of the problem-as-impetus clearly emerges. Engineers, as critics of existing products, are driven to devise further inventive steps to reach toward a more excellent product. With some exceptions (the Boeing 777 case, which although probably the most contemporary, seemed to be lacking an undefinable quality of fidelity: does he really get what's going on there?), the cases revolve around the thoughts and craft of individuals. In some cases (the drinks can) their identities are obscure, whilst in others (the bridges of San Francisco) they spring from the pages dramatically. Exhibitions of patent documentation provides the bare bones, Henry P re-constructs the whole animal.

It's also clear that teams of engineers, or even distant collaborations, don't simply progress by cutting through an underlying bedrock of physical properties to get to the solution they seek. Rather, at each inventive stage, a higher order product, an improvement from the last, emerges from a mist. Thus we step from toggles to buttons, thence to what must have a been a nightmare of "automatic" clothes-tieing devices, to the zip as we know it. A series of hops then to the Ziplok bag, and yet another string of manoeuvres to Velcro.

But perversely, despite each invention begetting more invention, at the same time each enlargement of the scope and scale of the products seems to make it harder to analyse the next-generation design. Boeing's exponentially growing development budgets attests to this. Not all of the added complexity comes from within the product though, as there are network effects and social or legal changes concerning the use of the products that add further layers of requirement to each iteration.

The idea of resources as enablers, such as materials or tools, for certain types of design activity is also strongly exposed. He exemplifies this all through the book, pointing to CAD as a key technology for Boeing, standardisation for the Crystal Palace among many others. He seems to be too early to notice much use of computing in architecture though.

The chapter on buildings as systems shows how the problem complexity rises with each generation. Perhaps there is an inherent bias in these works, forgetting the industrialisation of innovation in mundane structures. The wonder of the local supermarket, reproduced thousands of times, as opposed to the award-seeking skyscrapers of the capital.

He uses terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of resilience of design. He refers of course to the 1993 bombs in the basement. What would he make of the later total failure of the designs in 2001, and was this indeed a failure of that particular building as a system, but a failure of a wider, un-designed system?

New Technology Disaster

Here's a story about waste from the streets of England. Generally speaking, the streets of the Kingdom are not strewn with rubbish, by international standards. The systems and infrastructure to support the removal of our wastes might not be the best possible, but they are pretty good.

It wasn't always. Go back a century or two, and you really would be looking at serious daily health hazards, not only in piles of discarded household waste, but also human wastes. Remember the Great Stink? Not many do, that's why I'm glad to plug UCL's Stinkfest.

But I digress. What happens when technologists look at systems for economically collecting waste, with the added requirement of wanting to incentivise waste reduction. This is a new requirement by the way. Back when you could throw everything away, you could run waste as a reactive service. Nowadays there is no "away", and the economist's response is to put a price on waste. From a local council's point of view, this makes sense. Bin-men cost money.

Enter technologists. Let's weigh the bins as we collect, and send you the bill for massive wastefulness. Sounds good, except even if it works in Germany or Shangri-La, it will need installing here. By "it" we mean weighing arms, identifiable bins or houses, recording systems, billing systems, training and all the rest of it. Not a light bulb then, but a complex system. You can expect databases to grind, for people to be standing in the wrong place, and for the odd bit of hardware to get broken. Worse than Terminal 5 on a good day, just like all perfectly normal field tests of things which looked fine in the lab.

Two stories from the press, following a halted trial, (not even a "pilot") in Norfolk:

Daily Mail (hates the government for messing with the bins, and god knows what else) "disaster, devastating blow for the scheme"

Guardian : "Schemes to go ahead"

Partly, these trials got media attention because of the RFID angle "they are spying on our bins, haven't they heard of the Magna Carta?". What most irritates me, aside from the axe-grinding of the Mail, is the complete lack of technological nous. It's obvious to me, admittedly now after years of exposure to the field, that the newer and bigger the tech the more carefully it will have to be prototyped and worked out locally before going live. So it's a "disaster" then? The local Tory MP cheerfully jumps on and pronounces left, right and centre, and tries to shake of the "government-imposed scheme" (the local council would have creamed off a good wodge of the Government grant for trying this out on their patch, and would have been in the front line for savings from a live scheme).

The Grauniad's report on the other hand isn't really looking at the technical risks at all, but sells it as political battle, showing the government's deafness to its critics. It's just as blind to the systems development issues.

The Mail could still be right, there could be serious system-level difficulties with this system, and they could be unique to the UK, or indeed South Norfolk. We just don't know reading these reports.

Girls guiding cats in herds

Here are two more PM/systems blogs.

A Girl's Guide to Managing Projects
Herding Cats

Very observant readers may also note that I've migrated my blogroll from Bloglines to Google reader. It was fairly easy. It's slightly less neat, but it's actually the reader that I use and update now.

ISS safety/threat analysis

A small wobbly hut 200 miles from anywhere, with a hazardous environment behind every door, wouldn't be my favourite place for a lab. But you know, those in the BAS or in submarines just have to put up with it. Technical strategies and management plans to deal with risks and hazards have emerged in these fields over time.

Here's another wobbly hut, far from anywhere, which sometimes acts a research station but is these days probably best regarded as a demonstrator for plans to go and set up huts even further away, like on Mars.
The owners have just released a summary of a safety investigation and risk analysis for the station. Very interesting reading - 4 MB PDF. For the impatient, they are worried about what we worry about: dust and bugs.

Scanning the horizon

Back from a short break in not-quite-as-hot Cornwall, after a blazing week in which there was a substantial UCL/MSSL stand at the sweaty Farnborough Air Show. Some of this featured the newly established Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network, some of it the activities of MSSL in general, and some of it the activities of our Technology Management Group and the UCL Centre for Systems Engineering. Here's the UCLse poster on the left (I'm quite proud of the background photo):



The value of this activity to us comes from being visible to the community (we were placed in the International Space Pavilion), and at the same time as being in a good position to look closely at other activities and possible partners for future collaborations. To catch fish, you have to go fishing.

On my routine trawl through news items, I saw that Sarah Bell's MSc in Environmental Systems Engineering made it to UCL News. Disclosure: this MSc is linked to our MSc in Systems Engineering Management. The second photo above is from the launch event for the MSc.

The spin this time was the association with tribewanted, and how students on the MSc would get involved in studying enviromental problems on this island community. Sounds like a set of extreme projects as well. It would be good to see how groups of people – presumably untrained in PM skills – organise themselves in that situation, and to write about it from a formal PM perspective.

Sarah also admits to having a blog, Cyborg Engineers, which despite being rather dormant looking, brings us the zeitgeisty concept of "Dilbertian frustration with management". She doesn't specify whether as subject or object of the verb!

The J Curve: The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution

Fascinating post on fundamentals to do with Design as we know it vs. emergent paradigms such as GA-driven problem solving.

The J Curve: The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution

Steve Jurvetson is mostly taking about how to do it, how to get a big system off the ground using parts that are designed and parts that are brewed. The interfaces, aargh the interfaces. Every surgeon knows that evolution gives you beautiful functionality but messy interfaces.

Steve presents these two as divergent paths, but I think I'm more hopeful for success in integration of the two styles of technology. I'm not sure why, but I think Layers and Architectures are significant and helpful.

We could add to this another dimension of systems engineering - the Verification/Validation stage. Many of the patterns that have been establisehd in systems engineering rely on transparency of design. Given an evolved system, or even a designed system containing an evolved system, how do you verify the integrity of the system if you can't inspect the drawing or the code?

Or what if the system itself evolves in use, such as an automonous array of communications routers, or a fleet of spacecraft? How can the safety of the users be assured?

We need to look at tending gardens, using animals and employing people for models of how organisations use evolved resources in systems. Track record and training will be as important for machines as it is for people and organisations.

Architectures and Organisation

In this post (and its predecessor) David J Anderson speculates (in his Agile Management blog) on how Lean ideas and product architecture play against each other.

It's pretty obvious I think, that when you have a team of organistions working on a product, some of the decisions about the architecture and interfaces of the product are determined by the organisational structure of the team, and that a different set of partners working on the same problem would develop a different architecture, for management rather than technical reasons. This is entirely legitimate by the way, and working out the best route is part of the function of all technical managers. Sometimes the organisation will be shaped by the product, and sometimes vice versa.

Anderson's thoughts are directed toward Lean, or Agile development, and how that imparts further gradients onto the decision space.

Requirements resources

I'm becoming involved in Requirements Engineering (RE), as it is now known, on numerous fronts, including a module for our MSc in Systems Engineering Management. This relates in many ways to the front-end management issues that I've written about here previously. Consequently, I'm in knowledge acquisition mode.

Our requirements tutor, Anthony Hall, hopefully won't mind me mentioning that Ian Alaxander's site is packed with great book reviews including many on RE.

More requirements-tagged items: requirements