We hope all those celebrating over Christmas had a safe and happy time, and were not too badly affected by Covid 19. Welcome to the January 2022 – Newsletter.
Into a new year and a time to reflect on both your company’s achievements and problems. Whilst the turn of a date is nothing magical, the psychological effect of a new term can really help enthuse and help us focus.
If a project wasn’t quite on track, a root cause analysis can help identify where things went astray. Use this as a positive for new projects and look out for the ‘gotcha’ next time round. It is also important to identify the successes, the team and company can lever the feel-good factor on jobs well done.
Training
Online Cradle Training
We’re putting together this year’s public training course calendar. These courses are open to all and are delivered online in a shared environment with a live instructor. The biggest benefit of live training is that you can ask questions as the course progresses.
If your company has a large number of trainees or wants the course tailoring contact salesdetails@threesl.com
The first RM training this year is – Requirements Management May 2022 course.
“A great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle”
Online Course
Businesses that are introducing Cradle and full Requirements Management processes into their operations, can book training for all aspects of the roll-out, from the basics through to specialist administration courses – See here. These courses are tailored and held at your premises / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Requirements Management May 23rd – 26th 2022
If, however, you have one or two people new to a project or only have a very small team, this may not be a viable solution. With 3SL’s public online courses, you’ll benefit from all the normal learning, but will have the chance to network and share with other virtual attendees from other industries. This can be a cost effective solution to get you up to speed with Cradle and Requirements Management.
PC/Laptop – internet browser & Cradle installed **
Soft copy course materials, and printed certificate
If you would like to be kept in touch with the details for this Training Course – Requirements Management May 2022 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
The second RM training this year is – Requirements Management August 2022 course.
“A great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle”
Online Course
Businesses that are introducing Cradle and full Requirements Management processes into their operations, can book training for all aspects of the roll-out, from the basics through to specialist administration courses – See here. These courses are tailored and held at your premises / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Requirements Management August 15th to 18th 2022
If, however, you have one or two people new to a project or only have a very small team, this may not be a viable solution. With 3SL’s public online courses, you’ll benefit from all the normal learning, but will have the chance to network and share with other virtual attendees from other industries. This can be a cost effective solution to get you up to speed with Cradle and Requirements Management.
PC/Laptop – internet browser & Cradle installed **
Soft copy course materials, and printed certificate
If you would like to be kept in touch with the details for this Training Course – Requirements Management August 15th to 18th please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
“If you were a tree, what type would you be?” OK, we’re not attempting to delve into a mindfulness session, but drawing a comparison in terms of ongoing development.
Drop or Retain?
Evergreen/Deciduous
Each year deciduous trees protect themselves by shedding their leaves. The likelihood is the water will freeze and damage their leaves, or winter winds will apply a greater force to the trunk. Shedding them before the winter, allows them to renew with vigour the following year. They may also have become damaged in the summer by bugs or ripped in the autumn by winds, the shed leaves will act as nutrients for the following year. Evergreens, however, protect their leaves with a waxy coating and forms of antifreeze. Their leaves are often smaller, so the tree needs more of them to absorb the sun’s energy.
Start Anew
In the following year after the shut down, deciduous trees still retain their main structure, and the knowledge of how to build new leaves. The evergreens have to be content with the quality of the leaves they have, or have to try and grow new ones while simultaneously shedding the old ones. However, they have been able to continue absorbing energy through their leaves all year round.
Renewing Project Elements
Projects undergoing through lifecycle upgrades often have to decide which route to take. Do you remove the facility, rebuild (possibly including changes) and then deploy, or do you attempt to keep all the existing features in place while swapping out old functionality/parts and replacing them with new ones? Partly this will depend on the ‘down time’ that can be tolerated. A strip and replace is often more efficient, if allowed. The advantage projects have compared to trees, is all the new ‘leaves’ can be prepared in parallel, as long as they fit the trunk it’s a shorter operation to remove and replace the leaves. Whilst the ongoing partial replacement may allow continued operation, there are likely to be cases where parallel components/functions during the swap will have conflicts and interactions that will need to be managed. Of course in either case sometimes fiddling round with the leaves brings no new benefits, if the trunk or limbs are not where they are needed a completely fresh start is needed.
We looked at how Roles can speed up administration of Cradle users.
YouTube
Industry Sectors
For an insight into which industry sectors are spending on Requirements Management and Systems Engineering, checkout our mini presentation in this YouTube video
Finally
Remembrance
Drawing the November 2021 newsletter to a close, we hope all our customers, suppliers and staff that celebrated Dewali, All Hallows Eve and All Saints day or remembered the defeating of the Gunpowder plot had a happy and safe celebration. 3SL remembered those who fought and fallen on Remembrance day.
3SL is pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.6.1
This is available for download from the 3SL website.
Cradle-7.6.1 is the first patch release for Cradle-7.6, it is completely compatible with your 7.6 security code. Users with 7.6 do not need a new security code and can download and install without charge. Users on older versions of Cradle such as 7.5.3 or earlier can move to this version as long as they have maintenance. Simply request a new security code from the 3SL support team and get started!
Cradle 7.6.1 Released
Bug fixes included in the release are:
Issue found when copying items with change history turned on.
We’ve seen investment from a wide range of market sectors, all of whom have very differing products. However, there are many similarities in the processes that they use, based on their need to manage the same types of complexity.
Project Needs and Goals
Your Industry
Every project seeks to satisfy a set of requirements in a way that maximises compliance and minimises time, effort and cost. All projects must demonstrate that they have met the requirements by passing a variety of acceptance or validation checks. Therefore, RM (requirements management) is not unique to any individual industry.
Depending how you classify your ‘system’, the concepts and activities of Systems Engineering are also not ‘industry specific’. SE (systems engineering) may sound a little grandiose for some projects, but that depends where you draw your system boundaries. You could be modelling sensor data and control signals coming in, describing how these are manipulated and what outputs are expected. Alternatively you could be describing goods inward, shelving process and booking out.
What constitutes a ‘system’ depends on your industry sector, but the need for careful engineering of systems is common to all sectors.
Sector Investment 2020/21
Discover which industries are investing
Using 3SL’s end of year results grouped by sector we have highlighted an interesting change in RM and SE investment over the last year. Whereas aerospace, and military and defence projects had dominated in the past, construction and energy industries have made a heavier investment this year.
Percentage spend by sector 2020/21
Is Requirements Management and Systems Engineering Right for Your Industry?
If you make, design, or maintain a product, process or a development area, the answer is likely yes. Projects are most successful when; they can capture the needs of the stakeholders; help plan and develop the solution; provide traceability and reporting at the end. Rather than asking whether you need a RM and/or SE tool, ask why you wouldn’t want to keep control of your project operations.
Available Options
Ignore Systems Engineering principles and do nothing
Document using spreadsheets, word processor documents, paper files, cloud drives.
Invest in an integrated tool
Nothing
This first choice is hardly an option at all. How do you explain to your customers and stakeholders that you don’t really know what needs doing? You don’t know what the risks or boundaries are? You don’t know what you think you need to do to get to your undocumented goal?
Disparate tools
Electronic or paper documents are a great start. They can support a basic set of activities, the skeleton of a process. At the very least you have notes as to what, how and where your project is going. The major problems are:
Managing complexity
Recording changes and defining the consequential effects of change
Recording dependencies between documents and using these dependencies to ensure that consistency, once it has been achieved, is maintained as the information in all documents changes
Your workload increases enormously as your documentation grows and you must keep each individual element under configuration control and then providing links between each of those documents. How long do you need to spend in that document reference register keeping each need linked to the appropriate design spreadsheet entry……
Integrated Solution
It is no surprise that we would suggest that an integrated tool as the most appropriate and efficient way to work; to link all parts of your design lifecycle together; provide the means to capture, store and process those requirements; optionally link in system engineering designs; provide full traceability to the output. (Report, document, views etc).
Cradle
When selecting a tool it is important that it is a good fit for your process. It must meet the needs of your process without being so complex to use that it becomes self-defeating by transferring large amounts of work to manually maintain your documentation set into large amounts of work to manage the complexity of your software tools. This is the main reason why multiple tools can be a substantial drain on your resources, even assuming that you can actually interface the tools to each other.
Cradle can support some or all of your process… it is your choice. You decide which part or parts of your process could be helped by Cradle’s automation, its ability to link and cross reference information, and its ability to automatically track changes. The schema that you build in Cradle reflects how much of your process is Cradle to support, such as to manage and link:
needs -> user requirements
user requirements -> acceptance criteria
user requirements -> system requirements
system requirements -> validations
system requirements -> SBS
system requirements -> functions / behaviour
SBS -> architecture
architecture -> functions / behaviour
architecture -> verifications
functions / behaviour -> test cases
test cases -> test results
These process elements exist in the creation of aerospace / defence platforms, traditionally the main user of these sort of tools and methods. The design of process control systems, and the specification of I&C (instrumentation and control) systems in power plants has many parallels, and this is where we have noticed growth. However, we are pleased to say looking at the detailed data it can be seen that the processes are being applied in a wide range of other situations in so many sectors. The discipline of systems engineering is being applied to great effect to help to manage all their issues in so many industries. We build Cradle to try to automate and simplify the application of these systems engineering techniques, no matter what industry you are working in. Cradle provides our customers with the functionality giving them RM and SE power at their fingertips.
Convinced?
Still not sure whether you could benefit from an RM / SE tool? We’d be more than happy to discuss your projects and processes and make a recommendation. Book a webinar now.
As we’ve pointed out before, October was originally the eighth month, until King Numa Pompilius, inserted January and February. Until then ‘Winter’ was seen as monthless, with only 304 days belonging to named months. A bit of a design flaw. However, as with many systems, it was too onerous to start again, so the sticking plaster situation left us with October, November and December shifted two months from their name origins.
Eight In Life
In physics it is the second ‘magic’ number where either protons or neutrons, are arranged into a complete shell within the atomic nucleus.
Electronics and computing eight is the number of bit in a byte. 8 bits representing -128 to 127 or 0 to 255. If the last three bits of a number (when represented in binary) are 0s then the number itself will be divisible by eight.
In maths, other than 1, it is the only perfect cube in the Fibonacci sequence.
Your wisdom tooth is the eighth tooth in each quadrant of your mouth.
Eight is seen as a lucky number in Asian countries.
It the number of notes in an octave, a note of a frequency and its double.
There are 8 vertices to a cuboid.
Eight is Agile
Plan / Implement / Evaluate
Consider the two loops of the figure of 8 as the design and implement areas. As you trace round the outside, you start designing and planning and then you sprint round to implement a phase, before returning once again to consider achievements and plan the next step. This Scrum style operation breaks the problem down into small manageable chunks with an ongoing evaluation and planning. If you’re planning or adjusting a process in a Kanban style this repeated return allows changes to be measured and new bottle necks to be identified and alleviated.
An agile approach is an alternative to the traditional waterfall model to design and implement. It has its strengths in development of new or innovative solutions, especially where a degree of trial and prove/reject is also required. However, it should not be seen as a hackers remit. It only works if you clearly break down the problem, set goals and measure achievements. It could be viewed as a series of small waterfall operations defining each iteration.
Don’t Get Caught In A Loop
Iterative Progress
If your project is analogous to walking round and round a circle, something is going wrong. Walking in a figure of 8 gives you the opportunity to look forward and backwards as you trace your steps. your aim is for a steadily increasing climb.
Training Course
Cradle Online Training
Last chance to get booked onto the last public training course Document Publisher this year. Document Publisher Course 22nd – 25th November 2021 Following feedback this two day course has been spread over 4 * ½-day sessions to give candidates more time to practice what they have learned, and ask follow up questions at the next session. We’re busy putting together the 2022 schedule and would like to hear from you if there are any topics you would like to see covered, contact salesdetails@threesl.com
Features
Test Case
When you loop round your design and implement cycle, testing is an important step to validate your efforts.
Cradle’s Test, Execution and Recording module allows a controlled, rigorous way to record, and link your tests, design and requirements. Watch here. For more information read our blog.
Social Media
Twitter
Kuka UK Robot Tweet Oct 2021
We noted that in very hazardous environments robots are needed to repair other robots in this tweet by Kuka UK.
Whether it’s a representation of the CEO to the shop floor worker, or aircraft to the specification of the wing rivet, we all recognise a hierarchy. In Cradle, a Hierarchy Diagram (HID) is a graphical visualisation of how minor elements are combined in increasing complexity into increasingly large collections, to produce the item at the top, the subject of the HID.
Many use the metaphor that it is like a tree, the trunk as the core product, branching off to the smaller and less significant leaf nodes.
How important
Tree Roots and Leaves
The leaves are seen as the lowest level of importance. After all, a tree can survive without a few leaves, and not have any detrimental effect. This is likely true if we were building a house, if a supplier is unable to supply the kitchen cupboards, the house will not ‘fail’. It will remain standing and still be considered a house. It just can’t be considered 100% complete. And it may be a little inconvenient to store your pots and pans.
However, if we consider that the way we normally draw a hierarchy diagram is more like a tree’s core with the roots flowing down. Now, let’s consider what would happen if one small root picked up a detrimental chemical from the soil. This would travel throughout the tree damaging the core trunk. In the case of the aircraft rivet, a change in quality or specification of this lowest level element could have disastrous consequences for the whole aircraft system. Here the nodes (at least some) are crucial to the integrity of the product.
Which Way?
There is no right way or wrong way to represent and think of a hierarchy. It will depend on your organisation / system / product. It may even apply differently to different parts of the system. However, it is important that you consider what your hierarchy represents and what part the end nodes play.
Training Course
Cradle Online Training
Due to popular demand an extra Document Publisher course has been scheduled this year. Document Publisher Course 22nd – 25th November 2021 Following feedback this two day course has been spread over 4 ½-day sessions to give candidates more time to practice what they have learned, and ask follow up questions at the next session. We’re busy putting together the 2022 schedule and would like to hear from you if there are any topics you would like to see covered, contact salesdetails@threesl.com
Features
From Item to Hierarchy
Cradle allows you to draw a hierarchy diagram from any linked item. This gives you an instant visualisation of how related components fit together. Watch this clip https://youtu.be/IA4AFZyRrQo and other tips on our YouTube channel, and don’t forget to Subscribe. Find out more in this blog article.
Social Media
Twitter
Thales September 2021 Tweet
We looked at the benefits of using Thales using robots in the growing, but hazardous offshore wind environment.
We reminded you that, as we move back to offices and workplaces after home working, our environment risks consideration are as important as our product assessments.
YouTube
Delete / Recover
We added a video to remind users how they can ‘get back’ items deleted by mistake.
Finally
So while you decide which type of tree and which way up you are, we’ll say goodbye from September 2021 Newsletter.
Document Publisher November 22nd – 25th November 2021
Due to popular demand, we’ve added another chance to make your output shine with Cradle report creation training – Document Publisher November 2021 course.
“Once you have managed your requirements and development, producing a comprehensive report, automatically based directly on the project data, provides an essential deliverable”
Online Course
Businesses that have Cradle for their Requirements Management or Systems Engineering process can benefit from additional Cradle tools.
Document Publisher is a Windows® based publishing tool that allows professional documentation to be produced directly from the data within your project’s database. Fully understanding how to configure templates and data manipulation will offer the best output for you to provide to your stakeholders and customers, regulators and other interested parties.
Public Document Publisher Course November 2021
Often the document production task is run by an individual or a very small team. Therefore, this public online course will offer a cost effective way of providing training. You’ll benefit from all the normal learning, but will have the chance to network and share with other virtual attendees from other industries. However, if you have a larger team courses can be tailored and held at your premises / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements at a date and time to suit see here. This will be conducted over four ½ days.
PC/Laptop – internet browser & Cradle installed **
Soft copy course materials, and printed certificate
If you would like to be kept in touch with the details for this Training Course – Document Publisher November2021 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
