• Rule of Insight: Theory + Experience = Insight. True insight is imbued with significant meaning. What questions do you ask about your theories and how do you draw on your experience to find insight and meaning?
• Rule of Proven Methods: Use the wheels others have invented. Continually add to your skill set. Do you replace methods that don’t work as quickly as you replace staff?
• Rule of Simplifying: Work to optimize the entire organization system, not on the departments within it (Systems thinking). Doing so will help you to see new things and to simplify.
• Rule of Hindsight: Differentiate between true cause and effect, correlation and coincidence. Coincidence typically provides false signals and “noise.” What methods do you use to differentiate between cause/effect, correlation and coincidence … between signals and noise?
• Rule of Productivity Increases: Quality and productivity should attract crowds and money. If they don’t, something is wrong. Do you know why and how quality, productivity, and speed increase or decrease together?
• Rule of Performance Measures: Pay for process, not performance. Can you turbo-charge your organization’s performance without using incentives, rewards, and performance appraisals?
• Rule of Foresight: Use the ability to innovate and anticipate to create value. What processes do you have in place to foster creativity and new ideas? How well does your organization “see around corners”?
• Rule of Increasing Profits: Focusing only on the end results will destroy profits over time. Improve processes to create outcomes you want. There are only 3 ways to get better numbers. Do you know what they are?
• Rule of Competitiveness: Innovate continuously and forever with today’s and tomorrow’s customers in mind. Do you know why bench-marking can be dangerous? Do you know how to cooperate with your competitors? Can you change the game?
• Rule of Managing:Become your true self. Help others to become themselves. Continuous learning is the only sustainable source of power you have. Are you able to use theory and knowledge to create continuing power for change?
• Rule of Marketing/Sales:Combine analytical thinking with creativity. Create speed and simplicity. Foster alignment between marketing and sales. Are you using theory and knowledge to create growth?
• Rule of Strategy:Change the game. No other strategy counts long term. Type I Strategy: Do you really know how to increase the effectiveness of your organization to accomplish daily work? Type II Strategy: Have you rejected traditional planning methods which favour reacting over predicting and creating?
• Rule of Rapid Prototyping:Rapid prototyping experiments (aka: Plan-Do-Study-Act) is the most powerful profit and productivity improvement tool ever. Run cycles to learn what works, and what doesn’t. Do you use PDSA to unleash incredible energy and ideas?
• Rule of Implementation: Knowledge + Doing = Results. In other words: Try it! Do you like it? Start small. Scale up quickly. Spend less on R and more on D. Are people in your organization afraid to implement? If “yes,” do you know why? If “no,” are you sure?
• Rule of Attraction: Create a workplace that attracts people to their colleagues and their projects. Make a positive difference in the lives of your staff, customers, and vendors.

http://www.kellyallan.com/rulesofplay.html

The is no point listing every actor within a system who isn’t a stakeholder, so even assigning someone a value of nought, is not a negative reflection of them or their contribution as the scale is relative. Time was easy to quantify across a ten point scale, as was the type of relationship, but translating these indicators into guidelines and benchmark statements for INTEREST and INFLUENCE is tricky.

The amount of influence EngD academic/industrial supervisors have or exert is subjective and depends on too many variables. You will want to foster/create relationships with all stakeholders and aimed to engage them with your research and objectives.

Your thoughts?

My LEAN work board to stop poor multi-tasking

The focus is that you will only ever have two short term jobs in progress at any one time or three active long term jobs. You will not need this approach if you do not have many tasks assigned to you, but there are companies out there that think any employee that does not have ten active tasks to be done, is not a busy employee.

The idea is simple, by using the work board you dynamically structure your workflow and reduce the temptation to switch to another task until either of the in-progress tasks is either completed or needs external input. By focusing on a smaller set of tasks the idea is that the amount of productive work you do will increase as you spend less time swapping your attention between activities. You will need to become familiar with the process as ‘customers’ or ‘managers’ will not be pleased to see 0% progress on their task after two weeks, but you know that once you get around to the task it WILL be completed in good time.

To gain a systems engineering perspective on my research, (without bothering anyone else), I decide to try and use the INCOSE Z guides to influence my perspective on my research questions. Having defined a grand research question, and then broken it down into sub questions of interest (and even work flow themes), a spreadsheet provided a matrix with questions against Z Guide perspectives that helped to guide my thinking along system engineering principles in relation to me research.

INCOSE Z Guide against research questions produces a work breakdown structure

Completing the matrix took longer than expected as it helped to stimulate ideas and new directions that I had not previously considered. My thinking had been along the perspectives outlined in Z1 Systems Engineering, Z4 Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Z7 Systems Thinking and Z8 Systems Architecture, I was surprised by the new thinking direction inspired by Z2 Enabling Systems Engineering, Z3 How SE can save business money, Z5 Lean Systems Engineering, and Z6 SE Competency Framework. The title of the guides on the matrix were enough to alter my perspective to each research question and now I nearly have a work breakdown structure to move forward with.

An example of Gamification is the Foursquare which rewards users badges for ‘checking in’ to various places. By rewarding users in a game like way, Foursquare achieves its underlying objective of gathering data on the places you and your friends have been.

Draw Something, The ten-day-old social game had been downloaded more than 1.2 million times.
Now the company has shared even more staggering numbers with us. In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times. That’s more users than 3-year-old Foursquare has. That’s almost as many users as 1.5-year-old Instagram. Draw Something is one of the fastest growing mobile apps of all time.
DIGITAL STATS blog

Two new research studies by The Nielsen Company and comScoreoutline the growth in mobile application usage. Games rank first among popular cell phone applications in the US among both Smartphone and feature phone users, according to “App Playbook” data from The Nielsen Company. Music ranks second, with nearly an equal number of Smartphone and feature phone users. Mobile networking ranks third, but it is the fastest growing category.

Between April 2009 and April 2010, the number of mobile phone users who accessed a social networking application showed a growth of 240% – the number of users increased from 4.3 million to 14.5 million.according to comScore MobiLens data.

Gamification of Work

“Gamification of Work” refers to the application of game mechanics to day-to-day work within a company. A traditional example would be to use a reward mechanic; sales teams might get a bonus for successful sales contracts, or a member of a service team might receive the ‘employee of the month’. Technology now allows for a more dynamic, real time, task-based reward and recognition system. While shopping loyalty cards can be seen as a part of a reward system, gamification seeks to define a number of tasks, each with clear objectives, leading to a particular reward value that contributes towards achieving an overall goal.

While many companies will review their salary and benefit scales periodically; the result being a bit of tweeking, gamification of work provides the opportunity to truly reward employees base on personal performance, in real time. I can easily see gamification embedding in organisations to initially record activity in real time, rather than projects being updated at the end of the week/month via timesheets. Work history over a period and achieving personal progress targets will be easily identifiable to line managers and employees themselves (I have a terrible memory).

This will change the relationship between organisation/line manager and employees, but hopefully forward thinking organisations will view gamification as a positive  to empower and reward employees, rather than a tool to enslave them.

Figure 1. University of Bristol, Systems Centre systems approach

It is widely recognised in industry that a systems approach is pivotal to the development of successful companies. A Systems approach can provide a vital competitive edge in developing new products and services and in creating flexible, responsive and efficient organisations.

Systems thinking can be applied to any organisation or any project, regardless of size and companies in almost any sector can benefit from adopting a Systems approach to their operation.

Using Systems methods, underpinned by research expertise allows organisations to maximise the value of people, technology, functions and performance.  Companies can benefit from adopting a Systems approach to all aspects of their operation.

New techniques in Systems Engineering, and the ability to integrate the hard and soft aspects of Systems, are providing exciting opportunities for innovation.

The Systems Centre currently collaborates on more than 50 projects with more than 30 companies, teaching and developing approaches that address the requirement for enhanced performance of Systems.

The approach used by the Systems Centre (Figure 1) extends the USA National Science Foundation Systems model by being stakeholder led, and is consistent with that published in the Royal Academy of Engineering’s “Creating Systems that work: Principles of engineering Systems for the 21st century” (243kb, PDF).

This approach seeks to identify the stakeholder requirements and the system solutions that will meet the requirements. The system solution may require a number of enabling technologies that must be integrated to provide the solution, and each technology must be understood and fundamental knowledge acquired.

Personal reflections on the approach

On first glance the approach can be easy to pass of as common sense;

• Stakeholder requirements – Find out what the problem is and what they want.
• Systems Solution – Come up with the fix
• Enabling Technologies – List what you’re going to use
• Fundamental Knowledge – Make sure you know how to put it together!

I recently revised the approach (Figure 1) as I believe the environmental constants and constraints should be highlighted, while the perspectives of stakeholders are listed along side requirements (and other factors). I will post a critic of the model in another post, but I wanted to talk about the core level of fundamental knowledge.

The EngD is promoted as a more practical doctoral research programme over the PhD due to the involvement of industry. While the contributions of PhD programmes have been welcomed, business has required investment to commercialise research findings. The EngD is suppose to help bridge this gap between academia and business.

When I consider the majority of engineering PhD research programmes I have been in contact with, they are mainly focused at the enabling technologies or system solution level. A gap in the literature has been identified or someone has a novel concept that then forms the basis of the research. The outcome of the research can be planned to ensure headlines, public interest and future funding. Every time I read any article with ‘Brain controlled …..‘ or ‘.. just by their mind/thoughts..’ or other attention seeking headline I groan inside. This need to capture the public or business interest in the research, I feel, focuses the output of research to be a prototype of new technology or process. The academic might want to showcase their CV in the hope of consultancy work. Current engineering PhD research mainly occurs between the enabling technologies or system solution level.

I am talking about PhD research within engineering, so why would I find this surprising? The problem I see is that academia is not focusing on the fundamental knowledge behind technology or systems. If a system is an assembly of nodes, and each node is a technology component, we are missing the fundamental knowledge that is the glue to keep it together and the knowledge of what should be placed where AND WHY!.

With my own research, I suddenly realised that for last few months I had been discussing how best to utilise enabling technology to improve the system solution and how the overall improvement would be measured, when it slowly dawned on me that those little concerns in the background about not being able to truly measure ‘better’ or quantify why we should use one technology over another, those little concerns might need to be addressed. My research has now changed significantly to try and address these challenges due to a lack of fundamental knowledge and understanding in the field.

Using the 5WH for each level;

• Stakeholder requirements - The Who.
• Systems Solution - The Where and How
• Enabling Technologies - The What and When
• Fundamental Knowledge - The WHY!

The EU plans to tackle this with a new European Cybercrime Centre , which would warn EU countries of major threats and alert them to weaknesses in their online defences. It would also identify criminal networks and prominent offenders, and provide support during investigations.

The centre will use information from the public domain, industry, the police and academia to assist cybercrime investigators, prosecutors and judges.

Anyone can be a victim of cybercrime – it includes:

• online identity theft

• computer fraud

• credit card scams

• sexual exploitation of children

• hijacking of web accounts

• attacks on public or private IT systems

And this type of crime is increasing. Around 600,000 Facebook accounts need blocking every day after hacking attempts. In Belgium alone, internet fraud rose from just over 4,000 cases in 2008 to over 7,000 in 2010. And in the UK, bank account takeovers shot up by 207% between 2008 and 2009.

A crackdown on cybercrime will help to increase confidence in e-banking and online booking, and will save millions of euros – a 2011 study put the global cost of cybercrime at €85-291bn. Unfortunately, very few of the perpetrators are currently caught.

The pan-EU nature of the centre would ensure that threats are passed on quickly to other EU countries. If someone in Lithuania reports that their bank account has been accessed illegally, it could be linked quickly to similar incidents anywhere from Greece to Ireland, allowing the centre to immediately alert all EU countries to the threat.

The centre would also respond to technical and forensic questions from investigators, prosecutors and judges. It said this will be established to help EU member states’ investigations into cyber crime and to map organised crime online.  It will also be responsible for training national experts on cyber crime and will form part of the EU police agency Europol. The centre would be based within the European police agency – Europol in The Hague, which must first approve the proposal. The European Commission (EC) is to propose the establishment of a Cybercrime Centre to tackle rising levels of online crime within member states.

The centre, which the EC first mentioned in its 2010 Internal Security Strategy, is due to open in 2013 and is the latest EU move to combat cyber crime.

Speaking at a press announcement, Cecilia Malmström, member of the EC in charge of home affairs, highlighted the low costs of credentials and said that cyber crime creates fear “of putting things online, of using social networks, a fear of our ordinary internet lives”.

She said e-commerce only equates to four per cent of the EC’s economy, so there needs to be a strengthening of confidence among consumers, particularly in light of the current euro crisis. Asking what can be done, she said: “Let’s put the best people together, the best brains to identify the main cyber criminal networks and the main threats in cyberspace.

“That is why the commission is proposing today to put together a centre that will bring together some of the best brains in the field of cyber crime, under the flag of Europol in The Hague.”

Malmström added: “This will not target individual file-sharers, this is about severe organised cyber crime across the European Union.” She also said the centre will be a hub to defend an internet that is free, open and safe. Its proposed budget is around €3.6m.

Jeremy Nicholls, European channel director EMEA at Arbor Networks, said: “We believe that the EU’s move towards creating this centre is a step in the right direction, but there needs to be a co-ordinated effort across the industry to really make this work.”

Joseph Souren, vice-president and general manager of Wave Systems EMEA, said: “The announcement shows a serious intent to fight back against the torrent of cyber crime that has affected organisations worldwide for too long. We see thousands of new forms of malicious software code being launched against all types of organisation each month.  Co-ordinated efforts, led by units such as the EU Cybercrime Centre, can not only help to map the extent of online criminal activity, but also advocate more robust IT defences.”

Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable Network Security, said: “Cybercrime is often perpetrated by individuals working together from different countries so I’m in favour of any law enforcement initiatives that allow for easier sharing of cyber crimes, the techniques used and any data that may have been stolen. The introduction of a new European Cybercrime Centre will enhance cyber-crime coordination across the EU. At the moment, each EU country has different laws which affect user privacy and stipulate varying corporate penalties for losing data.

“Coordinating cyber crime offenders at the EU level will not only better leverage crime fighting resources in each EU country, but it will also provide a consistent response. It is also important to remember that while the new EU cyber crime centre will focus on eCommerce and protection of internet users privacy, if and when there is a cyber-terror event, the culture and practices of sharing cyber-criminal investigations will ultimately enable the EU to respond quickly and effectively.”

More on cybercrime and the EU

Here’s one reason we mess up: Money is just a number.
Seth Godin

Number of hours worked. One proposed solution is not focus on the financial figure but on the effort required to equal that number, e.g  in terms of hours worked. The price of items can be distorted when purchased as add ons and extras as part of a larger purchase (and marketers know this). By understanding how much your time is worth per hour/week will help you make more informed decisions.

The first step is work out your personal hourly rate or the regional hourly rate for labour – for example I keep a £30ph figure in my head whenever people quote for work to gage value, or a figure of £10ph that I’d pay myself if I want to work out how many hours I would have to work to purchase something. Research by the TaxPayers’ Alliance reveals that the Cost of Government Day or Tax Freedom Day in 2012 will fall on 26th July 2012. In the UK, we all have to work seven months to pay for the government, but I’m not sure if the increase in retirement age has been factored into this estimate.

Do I really need it? We were asked in a lecture recently, when was the last time you had to seriously consider or evaluate whether to make a purchase? The question was posed to demonstrate how few of us stop to consider our purchasing habits unless we are faced with (relatively) large purchases (e.g a new car or other high value item). Myself and another research engineer were amused to find that we both evaluate and make decisions with nearly every purchase, so were the only two to put our hand up in the “this morning” category. The decisions discussed are not whether to have a coffee or not, but the impact on personal finances for that day/week.

Just say No. How many times to you take the Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF), or Three for Two offers? Do you accept the extra cover, payment protection, loss or theft, replacement and car hire option, additional RAC cover and other bells and whistles for only ££? How often do you practice saying ‘No’, even when the sales people seem to be offering a bargain for a little extra? Local stores seem to be pushing a very annoying habit of taking time before you purchase an item, to have one last chance to offer you chocolate or cut price dvds for a low price. This is highly annoying for all concerned as they have to offer, I have to decline and we’ve all wasted time for a meaningless dance that might increase sales in these items, but has reduced the throughput thanks to a self imposed bottle neck. I think people should take a holiday to Tenerfie and expose themselves to a constant stream of club reps who are desperate to secure people into their clubs and street sellers on every corner who know all the tricks. If you don’t have a hide like a rhino and the ability to ignore people, then you’ve probably hiding in your room.

Financing your lifestyle. Whenever people talk about money, the question of living with your means is raised. The most basic equation is calculating total income and using your bank statements to work out your total outgoings. If outgoings are greater than income then your lifestyle is not sustainable and change is required urgently. Addressing your spending habits should highlight what is needed (rent, food, bills, etc) and what is leisure and luxury. There are numerous programmes on tv that demonstrate some horrendous attitudes to money, but nothing is scary as finding out the spending attitudes of people you know. I’ve had a friend who is struggling to pay off a student overdraft, but was also putting a small amount money every week into a saving account. This savings account was giving them a false sense of security, and they might go shopping once in a while, ready for the holiday that the savings would be spent on. In this position, they should have been re-paying their overdraft and I gave the ‘You have no savings, while you have debts‘ talk (as a simple message was required).

The value of money might be hard to remember when people are offering dreams and bargain deals, but as long as we remember to stop and consider the added value we see of having the product against the price asked for it, whether we really need the product today and having the strength to say no and walk away while remembering how the purchase will affect our overall quality life, we should be in a position to make better decisions and value our purchases.

BERT image and robot facial expressions

For an experiment into human perception of robot facial expressions I collected Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to record participant consent and contact information. This consent was recorded separately (hard copy) to a more detailed questionnaire about lifestyle (hard and soft copy), but linked via a participantID.

After the award of the masters degree, publication of a science paper and waiting a sufficient delay for any queries or reasons to contact experiment participants, there is no longer any suitable reason to retain the contact information or the hard copy of the questionnaire. All digital information has been burned to a DVD as the participants agreed that the anonymised data can be stored and used in future research.

While my research focus has moved into a different domain, I am still interested within the perception of humanoid robots and their use in EEG and psychology experiments.

PII destruction notification

Google didn’t bring up a PII destruction notification template so I actually had to write a letter (below for those who want to copy and paste).