SIG Workshop at DSM Conference 2010, Cambridge, UK - July 2010

From DSMwebWiki

Conference Information: http://www.dsm-conference.org

Abstract

The interest of the SIG is to relate researchers and practitioners who are working with the different facets of managing structural complexity, i.e. the entities and relations of a system and how their arrangement induces a certain behaviour into the system. In a survey, currently, the use and experiences in dependency modelling, the challenges of data acquisition, analysis and generation of indications are regarded to deduce guidelines for research and for knowledge transfer to industry. The survey is done in collaboration with the SIG, and its data is intended to help all members of the SIG. Therefore, questions of interest to the DSM Community and facets of complexity that need more focus are discussed during the workshop.

Agenda of workshop

13:00 Introduction (Steven Eppinger, Maik Maurer)
13:10 Presentation and discussion of current survey on dependency modelling (Matthias Kreimeyer, David Wynn)
14:00 End

Discussion and results

Understanding complexity

Do people have different views?
What are the respondent demographics?
What is the difference between research and industry responses?
Who in industry has to be supported by models or modelling? What roles?
The term "structural complexity" is hard to pin down in industry. What is the understanding of "structure" and "complexity" in industry?

Industrial need for complexity management

What are common applications of DSM?
Possible answers:
- Managing projects
- Managing relationships (external stakeholders)
- Managing relationships (internal stakeholders)
- Ship design
  - (architecture of process, information flows and exchanges between activities and tools that are used)
  - Difficulty extracting knowledge from experts ? reluctant to put knowledge down in reusable form. Others not able to covey what they do.
Is it possible to evaluate risks based on DSM?
How can iterations be better understood?
How can interfaces between stakeholders be better managed?

Using methods of dependency modelling

What ways are there to generate dependency models? What representation of the knowledge is there?
- Possible answers:
  - Reverse engineering
  - Documents
  - Interviews
People don't have time to hire people to explicitly build process models or to build them themselves (in building industry). What means such as data mining can be used to build models?
Can a more automated dependency extraction make DSM more widely used?
What are the preconditions required to make DSM work?
How can the level of maturity to achieve success with DSM be measured?
Can model processes (building design) using templates; gets 90% of the stuff. But is there a "not invented here" syndrome? Observation: Organisations have to go up a learning curve to benefit from these ideas. In many projects information is in the head of the designers. 80% of the time is invested in information acquisition. By then they have learned a lot and may not even have to show the DSM?

Research focus

Should we spend more time thinking about how to elicit knowledge, not just methods and tools?
Do we underestimate the difficulty of implementing methods (putting into practice, not tools)?
What is the element of research related to human factors (e.g. getting the knowledge into the DSM, people maybe feeling threatened etc.)?
Is it possible to create "live visualisations" as people correspond by email etc.? "dashboards for managers"?
Does it need IT systems to make it work?
How can metrics be put in place (cost of using DSM, benefit)? What metrics should be used?

Presentation of results