Technical program highlights
Mentor Connection | Practitioners’ Challenge | Industry Tracks
Mentor Connection
The Mentor Connection is back again for IS2016 in Edinburgh, UK. During this special opportunity to connect, experienced symposium attendees are encouraged to reach out to new members and first-time symposium participants!
The Mentor Connection is an opportunity for seasoned International Symposium attendees to help those new to this forum to maximize their International Symposium experience and at the same time see the symposium themselves through new eyes. How many degrees of separation are there between the seasoned regular attendees and their most distant connection? New members can tap in to this network, and seasoned regulars can extend their own networks.
Mentors will increase the value of IS2016 for newer members of the INCOSE community by helping those new to the International Symposium make connections, and build personal relationships between systems engineers. They will also encourage participation by helping them navigate the sometimes complicated maze of papers, panels, roundtables and tutorials to find sessions of relevance to them.
The Mentor Connection is a volunteer-based activity with no lasting commitments beyond the symposium; we only ask that seasoned veterans with a passion for Systems Engineering and the International Symposium extend a helping hand to those who are first time attendees. For example: a new attendee to the International Symposium may not know what a plenary is or why they should attend, or what they should expect in a panel discussion. Mentors have an opportunity to lend a hand, and help grow the Systems Engineering community, sharing their experiences, lessons learned, and the value that Systems Engineering has brought them in their day-to-day lives.
Mentor, or mentee, you might just learn something new.
Practitioners’ Challenge
Saving the World from Asteroids using Systems Thinking & Enterprise Architecture
Building on last year’s success, the Events Committee has once again initiated a Practitioners’ Challenge. The purpose of this Challenge is to engage Symposium participants in a collaborative manner to demonstrate how systems engineering can be used to address and support solutions to global, sociotechnical issues. For this year’s Practitioners’ Challenge, the focus will be on the application of systems thinking and enterprise architecture methods to organising a global response to the threat of asteroid impacts.
A problem statement will be provided to all participants in the Practitioners’ Challenge on 13th June 2016, along with supplementary materials to be reviewed in preparation for the challenge before the start of the symposium. Participants will meet periodically during the course of the IS in a one of the rooms set aside for interactive workshop sessions.
The Practitioners’ Challenge will start by introducing and using systems thinking techniques to develop an understanding of the problem, working in teams which will explore different stakeholder perspectives, and then the emphasis will shift to introducing and using some common enterprise architecture principles and practices to structure the problem-space and explore the solution-space.
An outbrief on the Challenge will be provided to all Symposium participants at the Thursday afternoon plenary session. A report on the Challenge, including an overview and images of the artefacts created by the participants, will be published after the Symposium in the INSIGHT Magazine.
- Objectives
The primary objectives of the Practitioners' Challenge are: - To facilitate participant collaboration on a sociotechnical problem and demonstrate the value of applying systems thinking to these types of problems;
- To gain new insights into the application of systems engineering/systems thinking through the participation by a wide variety of systems engineers: new INCOSE members, members outside of the defence and aerospace domains, and senior members from defence and aerospace; and
- To create a series of artefacts that can be used by participants and by INCOSE to demonstrate this value, through a format which has potential for re-use at other events.
- Participation Eligibility
The Practitioner’s Challenge is open to all who are registered for IS2016. Vendors who have tools that are relevant to the Challenge are welcome to participate. However, the maximum number of participants will be 40. As one of the objectives is to engage a diverse set of IS2016 participants, including new members and members from multiple industry domains, individuals must indicate their interest when registering for the conference. The Practitioner’s Challenge team will include as many of those interested as possible and will send a confirmation notification to all of those who apply before 6th June 2016.
- Further Questions
The Practitioner’s Challenge Chair is Ian Gibson, ian.gibson@jacobs.com
Industry Tracks at the INCOSE International Symposium
One of the unique features of INCOSE is its cross-industry membership and attendance at the IS. This provides opportunities to get an ”outside the box” insight to how others practice Systems Engineering and how you can tailor SE for your situation. Equally, you may also want to meet other industry colleagues and learn how SE is applied within your industry.
For those delegates with interest in specific industries, we have compiled a set of “virtual tracks” indicating a recommended set of papers, panels, roundtables and working group sessions that are relevant for the specific industries. This year we have produced downloadable flyers for the Automotive, Healthcare and Transportation industries – see www.incose.org/symp2016/contact/downloads. It is also possible to apply industry-specific filters to each day shown on the Event Schedule to see what may be of specific interest from specific industries.
As a learning organisation, we encourage delegates to learn from each other and find out how other people are doing their SE, and the virtual tracks are a great starting point for this.