Renaissance(completed project)

Esprit Project 22010

Brief overview of the project

Many companies today find themselves relying on legacy systems which are problematic but critical their businesses. These systems often use old technology and need to be reengineered to bring them up to date on modern technological platforms so future evolution becomes part of normal maintenance effort. The important point ot note is that these systems are critical to the companies employing them and must remain in operation while the evolution takes place. Evolution can take the form of total replacement at one end of the scale to no change at the other to some form of reengineering in the middle.

The Renaissance project devised a method which could be used to assist a company to assess what type of reengineering it needed and then enable it to plan and execute a controlled evolution project.

The project was an EC cooperative one with partners from France, Germany, Italy, Norway and the UK.

The Renaissance web site, where details of the project and its deliverables can be found, was created and maintained by Lancaster University.

I was responsible for coordinating the partners' contributions to the Evolution Planning Report and also coordinating it with the relevant section in the Method document.

Emergency (completed project)

Esprit Project 29512

Brief overview of the project

The move to European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) will begin on 1st January 1999 when conversion rates of the paritcipating member states' currencies will be locked and the Euro introduced. This will also signal the start of a transition period, which will end in June 2002, during which trading can be in either national currency units or Euros. Euro notes and coins, however, will not be introduced until 1st January 2002 at which time national currencies will be withdrawn from circulation. This means there is a three year period when Euro trading is by EDI only. As a result of this timetable, many technical and business problems will be experienced by organisations within the participating member states as they move to comply with EMU regulations.

EMU means that those software systems which process financial information in any of the participating member states must, eventually, be converted from national currency units to Euros. To give an idea of the financial demention of the problem, analysts from the OVUM and Gartner Group estimate the overall cost of Euro introduction to be in the region of 200 and 300 billion ECUs. The adaptation of software systems will account for a large percentage of this. It can be seen that the introduction of the Euro will create a budgetary nightmare for the wide majority of European IT managers, especially as it coincides with the so-called Y2K problem.

The Renaissance project devised a method to assist an organisation to assess what type of reengineering it needed to handle its 'legacy dilemma'. It helped to devise an evolution strategy for a system and then provided guidance on how to plan and execute a controlled evolution project.

The objectives of the Emergency project are -

To assess the feasibility of applying the Renaissance method, particularly those parts of the method concerned with evolution planning, to the problems of Euro conveersion
To suggest method adaptations which will tailor it to this task

I am responsible for the 'Method Adaptation' deliverable and a final Case Study..

Enrich(completed project)

EPSRC / SEBPC program project number GR/M02965

Brief overview of the project

In response to increasing competitive pressure and customer demands for higher quality, increased functionality and lower cost, manufacturing industry is introducing new processes to support new product development (NPD). The primary aim of these new processes is to shorten product development cycles and, typically, they rely on concurrent rather than sequential processes of product specification, design and manufacturing. Global, concurrent engineering is now being widely applied in large manufacturing enterprises to develop, from the outset, new products/services in partnership with customers, contractors, suppliers and even with competitors. Such unprecedented business process changes have led to the widespread adoption of virtual team working practice in extended (virtual) enterprises.

It is widely recognised that computer-mediated support has an important role to play in this process change but introducing such support is complicated by the difficulties of providing timely access to design and manufacturing data. It can no longer be assumed that all members of a product team share a "physical work space", have access to the same knowledge, communicate on a daily basis and use the same support software. Rather than a product development team being relatively stable and co-located, NPD teams are likely to be distributed, dynamic and may include a range of specialists from different companies. Consequently, members of the NPD team may rely on defferent software tools and support systems and may need access to large volumes of legacy data on existing products which is not available on local computer systems.

The overall aim of Enrich is to investigate the migration of legacy product data to organisational intranets to support new product development processess in manufacturing industry.

Impression(completed project)

Esprit Project IST-2000-28760

Brief overview of the project

Efficient software development affects the overall performance of organisations whose business depends upon software quality. The IMPRESSION hypothesis, therefore, was that improvements in business performance can be achieved by improving an organisation's Requirements Engineering (RE) process. Our role in the project was to help assess the RE processes of nine Member Companies (each with a system at the requirements stage of development), recommend ways of improving them and quantify the improvements made. Other Partners defined and monitored business performance indicators, assessed the suitability of RE tools and techniques for the Member Companies' situations and facilitated the implementation of our recommendations into the Member Companies' RE processes.

We used the REAIMS model to assess the RE process maturity of each Member Company. To correlate RE process improvements with increased business performance, we performed an initial RE process maturity assessment, made recommendations for improvements which were implemented by the Member Companies, and then re-assessed to quantify the improvement made. At the same time we continually monitored business performance

To assist the RE process assessments we developed a tool, using Java and Microsoft Access, which embedded the REAIMS model and produced reports.

The project was an EC cooperative one with partners from Greece and the UK.

The Impression web site, where details of the project and its deliverables can be found, was created and maintained by the Athens Technology Centre.

I was responsible for setting up and performing the REAIMS RE process maturity assessments and producing 3 of the project deliverables.

Tracker (ongoing project)

EPSRC GR/R12183/01

Brief overview of the project

The amount of rework in a systems engineering project can be reduced by providing managers with information about their own decisions and decisions made by other project managers. This information will make decisions visible and will simplify decision impact and risk assessment. By helping managers understand the wider implications of their decisions and by avoiding premature or delayed decisions we will reduce the number of decisions that necessitate subsequent rework.