iReq - personal requirements engineering

Still waiting for delivery of my iPad 2... Not sure if I really wanted the email on May 12, confirming delivery for May 24. I guess the logistics people at Apple just like torturing their customers.

Solution seeking problem

While waiting for the delivery, I thought about potential use cases. As I didn't find too many, I decided to search the web. I came across a posting from a similar minded person called The iPad: An Elegant Solution in Search of a Problem. My favorite part was his reply to a comment praising the rather balanced posting: “Honestly, it was really hard to write this. I love everything about Apple. And the iPad is gorgeous. I just can't find a real use for it.” That was when I noticed the banner ad at the bottom of the screen. Now that fits.

It seems as if the iPad somehow changes the bottom-up approach of identifying the requirements first and then developing a solution. This is a case where a neat piece of IT inspires new solutions. More specifically: an IT platform that allows seamless integration of new solutions. One of the reasons for me buying an iPad was curiosity about these solutions - and being able to closely follow the evolving state of the art.

Business drives IT, right?

I felt reminded of some PLM discussions that go like this:

Q: What is the best PLM system?

A: That depends on your requirements.

Q: What can it do for me?

A: Everything you want it to do.

Q: What do I want?

A: Right.

Given the scope of today's PLM suites, it's hard to get a complete and consistent set of requirements including prioritization. Vendors keep adding innovative functionality such as compliance management and social product development, while the business is still digesting basic PDM and CAD data management. This is looking more like IT drives Business.

PLM at the crossroads

In this situation, I see two options: you can either continue with the slow but proven bottom-up process of analyzing the processes, specifying requirements, selecting a system, customizing it etc. - business drives IT. Or you could adopt a process of providing OOTB solutions from your PLM vendor of choice and finding a way to apply them in your business. This second option can only work, if the solutions are good - and if you have an IT platform that allows seamless integration of new solutions (hence the iPad). The major PLM suites might provide good solutions for all kinds of problems, but they struggle with the integration into an existing system. Each new module brings along a list of prerequisites and dependencies that still requires major efforts to implement that module.

Conclusion

A PLM platform that wants to support OOTB implementations needs sophisticated mechanisms to separate the customer-specific configuration and customizing from the underlying platform. This would not only ease the integration of new modules, but also the maintenance of the overall system through the release cycle.

Push or Pull: Change Management for Social Product Development

A colleague pointed me to the article „How to Encourage Staff Interaction Through Social Media“ in CIO.com. Daniel Gasparro, Executive Director and CIO, Howrey says „Encouraging collaboration, especially through social media, should be viewed as a change-management effort focused on the culture of your organization.”

I tended to think of the social computing as a nobrainer - with an almost iPad-like pull effect. In the context of change management, it is rather on the solution side of things than on the problem side. But the article certainly has a point: if the hierarchy isn't engaging in social computing and leading by example, the staff won't engage either - bad for collaboration...

On the other hand, I still believe in the pull-effect of social computing: people like to work with other people (rather than with “the computer”), i.e. the social component satisfies some basic needs. Being able to contribute to a community, to be recognized by your peers and to get your problems solved with the help of others is motivation enough.

Conclusion

Apply basic change management principles when introducing social product development methods. Management must engage and lead by example, early adopters should be rewarded and successes should be communicated broadly.

What are your experiences regarding push or pull when introducing social product development?

The engineering workplace 2020 at BMW

I found the presentation from BMW’s CIO Erich Probst at the ProSTEP-iViP Symposium 2011 quite interesting. In his keynote, he presented the following slide (I took the freedom to translate it to English) on the engineering workplace 2020:

Engineering Workplace 2020 (Source: Erich Probst, CIO BMW)

His thoughts are mapping very well to my earlier posting on The future workplace in engineering. Regarding the attractiveness for digital natives, he adds the aspect of gaming to the use of social computing. He also addresses the potentially stressful flexibility of working in an “always on” mode.

Semantic Consolidation – Bits of Wisdom

The future workplace must support the engineer in dealing with multiple channels, e.g. by the use of Web 2.0 patterns such as aggregation, syndication and mashups. I don’t want the same bit of wisdom on Twitter, recommended by 5 friends, through an email notification and finally discussed at the good old coffee machine. This requires more than portal-like integration on the GUI level. It would require integration on a semantic level in order to identify that bit of wisdom. It’s then up to the user to determine the best channel to access this information. And it’s up to the systems to ensure that this information is not delivered redundantly to the same user.

Dr. Matthias Zagel from Consentor presented on a related topic at the same symposium with his speech about Networked Product Development. Their approach is to identify parameters that are relevant for coordination in a team. All discussions and decisions are organized around these parameters. They become a new PLM structure – next to product structures, functional & requirements structures, WBS etc. – to organize collaboration, decision making and knowledge management. On the one hand, I realize that it is already challenging to master the classical PLM structures. But on the other hand, I feel that Consentor’s approach of self-organizing collaborative processes supported by social computing is an innovative approach that points into the right direction. What do you think?

P.S.: the presentations are available at www.prostep.org for registered members of the ProSTEP-iViP association.

Open words – ProSTEP-iViP Symposium in the BMW Welt, Munich

Munich is the PLM capitol this week: the ProSTEP-iViP Symposium as the annual meeting of the PLM community took place on April 5-6, 2011 in the BMW Welt. Working for the PLM unit at Cirquent in Munich, I couldn’t miss this home match. We made a tag cloud poster to display our topics at the booth and were fortunate enough to have many interesting conversations with the 420 participants.

Cirquent PLM tag cloud

The vibes were all good – automotive and aerospace are doing much better than last year. A lot of PLM projects are to be launched now that were on hold in 2009 / 2010. The bottleneck seem to be the human resources for the project teams – the business experts at the companies are as busy as the consultants at the service providers.

BMW AIDA – PDM backbone for E/E

BMW not only sponsored the nice location, they also contributed some presentations to the conference. I was especially impressed with the AIDA presentation: the BMW project manager presented the vision for an integrated electrical / electronical development process. In the second part of the presentation, Dassault Systèmes made a live demo of CATIA Systems and Enovia V6 to show what is possible today. We from Cirquent are commited to the success of AIDA as an innovative and challenging project with about 30 consultants.

PLM Openness Initiative

The announcement of the ProSTEP-iViP association to launch a PLM Openness initiative in 2011 made my day. This is supposed to develop a codex for open standards and interfaces that can be supported by PLM vendors via a voluntary commitment. Not all vendors like to be open, especially when they consider proprietary technology as a competitive advantage. In my view, this initiative meets a critical customer demand, the control over product data as the main asset of a company. Please also refer to the discussion in End-to-end OOTB vs. open, standards-based PLM and in Open Standards and Data Sharing . I will follow this and support the initiative.

Looking forward to the next symposium at Airbus in Hamburg...

(Translated from my original German posting on Cirquent Blog)

Open Web 2.0 vs. Apps

Check out the great post from John Battelle called A Report Card on Web 2 and the App Economy .

He brought two topics together that I’ve been thinking about:

-          Web 2.0 principles – I was using them on Social Product Development defined

-          Apps – I was wondering about their relevance for PLM in No PLM apps at M-Days2011 - why not?

John Battelle analyzed how apps compare to today’s web in terms of the Web 2.0 principles originally established by Tim O’Reilly. He summarized his findings in this image and then discussed each in a bit more detail.

(Picture copyright by John Battelle, http://battellemedia.com/archives/2011/03/a_report_card_on_web_2_and_the_app_economy)

As you can see, apps don’t stand a chance against today’s Web (2.0) when measured in terms of Web 2.0 principles :-) .

So, what does this mean for PLM apps?

First of all, the PLM apps that currently exist represent a client for the corporate PLM platform, i.e. some of the principles just don’t apply.

But I think we can still transfer some of his thinking to PLM: 

• the control of data ownership is an essential topic, as discussed in End-to-end OOTB vs. open, standards-based PLM . By using apps as an online PLM client, we don’t create new issues in this field. But offline usage with the related data synchronization issues or even peer-to-peer networking of multiple mobile PLM devices would create new issues.
• We haven’t reached the End of the Software Release Cycle in PLM. On the contrary – release updates are still major projects with significant cost and risk. I like John’s comment that “the Web has totally checked this box - when was the last you checked what version of Google you were using?” With PLM apps, we just have to take care that we don’t pile up new release update issues.
• The rich user experience is where apps potentially beat native Web 2.0 applications – although you could argue that there are a lot of nice Web 2.0 site  and a lot of bad apps. But John’s point was that the user experience of apps could be so compelling that you just throw-away all the other principles of Web 2.0.

So where are the compelling PLM apps?

The future workplace in engineering

Does your company have an IT policy? If yes, chances are that it talks about the Internet to be used only for work-related purposes etc.. Newer versions of these policies even deal with social media, probably by banning the use of Facebook, Twitter and even blogs during work.

I always wondered how people can even get their work done in such companies, not to speak of outperforming the competition. Being able to listen and potentially communicate with your customers, your competition and your potential future workforce is a competitive necessity.

Marianne Levinsen, Futurist and Chief of Research at the Danish centre for future studies, describes the digital natives as a pretty challenging future workforce. The border between private and work life just disappears when you are connected to your colleagues in a social network and when you are “always on” with your mobile phone. OTOH, she also points out the gap between the different generations and the resulting challenges in motivating them. I just ordered "The 2020 Workplace" in order to dig into this topic.

(Amazon affiliate link)

Luckily, engineers tend to embrace the new stuff a bit faster than others. Social Product Development gives us a glimpse at the future workplace in engineering. And for the others, it might be a good start to loosen up the IT policies and start using social media for business benefits. What do you think?

End-to-end OOTB vs. open, standards-based PLM

I liked Oleg's recent post PLM Platform Wars: Who is Right or Who is Left? .

As commented several times, I agree that product data is the main asset of a company as PLM applications come and go over time. But I would like dig into another trade-off that PLM customers are facing when trying to act on this: the choice between cost-efficient, end-to-end solutions deployed “out of the box” (OOTB) from one vendor versus a multi-vendor PLM architecture based on open standards.

Product data is the main asset

Protecting this asset e.g. by knowing your logical and physical data model and by constantly monitoring the data quality is essential. An open, standards-based solution in this field basically means STEP for most of the meta-data model, potentially complemented by JT for geometry and newer incarnations of STEP such as PLM Services. Most PLM platform vendors have not adopted STEP as a major component of their product architecture – for reasons such as maturity of the standard and the need to differentiate the offering from the competition. You might find STEP interfaces for import and export, but as long as the internal core data (and services) models of the PLM applications are not STEP-based, the interfaces are rather weak links and create a lot of overhead for data mapping and data exchange. Integrating complex PLM architectures with hundreds of applications on this basis is still a bold venture that not many companies go into.

End-to-end PLM solutions OOTB

Sounds too good to be true, right? And I think it is. Even if one vendor had a good offering, the risk of committing your product data into a black box governed by one vendor is not very promising. In the current case of Dassault V6, I would distinguish two cases:

• MCAD-PDM: CATIA V6 with integrated Enovia team data manager
• Full PLM: the complete Dassault V6 vision of mechatronics PLM (RFLP)

I tend to think that the benefits of an end-to-end CAD-PDM solution could outweigh the risk (if you can still control your product data...), but I would think twice for my full PLM architecture.

What do you think?

Note: this view is driven by working with rather large, OEM-type companies in automotive and aerospace. Small and medium businesses might have different priorities.