David W. Stupples

Systems thinking for managing projects

Systems thinking is a discipline that his developed substantially over the last few decades but most project managers remain unaware of its potential power in helping analyse, refine and deliver their complex projects. In fact, over the past 30 years several hundred of the worlds largest and most complex projects have successfully used the technology to improve their outcome. Traditionally a time-consuming technique to implement, it has only been utilised for the most complex projects. However, these methods are fast becoming more accessible for large projects in general. Through modelling the rework cycle and the feedback loops that drive it, using system dynamics it is possible to analyse and hence improve the dynamic behaviour of our projects. In this paper we show how a system dynamics model of a project is constructed and used to assess the project outcome. Examples of its application include: cost versus schedule trade-offs, project improvement strategies, risk assessment and assessing resource constraints. The ability to deliver such answers quickly and accurately during the bid and project definition phases provides the project management team with a powerful decision making tool for project strategy formulation. The improvement in project outcome that can be achieved at this stage of the project is massive because of the low cost of change combined with a high leverage into project commitment, risk mitigation and outcome that is available early in the projects lifecycle.

Probability Analysis of Cyber Attack Paths against Business and Commercial Enterprise Systems

The level of risk of attack from new cyber-crime related malware is difficult to quantify as standard risk analysis models often take an incomplete view of the overall system. In order to understand the full malware risk faced by organisations any model developed to support the analysis must be able to address a statistical combination of all feasible attack scenarios. Moreover, since all parametric aspects of a sophisticated cyber attack cannot be quantified, a degree of expert judgement needs to be applied. We develop a modeling approach that will facilitate risk assessment of common cyber attack scenarios together with likely probabilities of successful attack for each scenario. The paper demonstrates through use cases how a combined attack can be assessed.

ICITST-2013: Keynote speaker 2: Security challenge of TOR and the deep web

The deep-dark web is both surprising and sinister and accounts for in excess of 90% of the overall internet. Google and other search engines deal only with the indexed surface web. The deep-dark web hosts illegal markets, such as the Silk Road, malware emporiums, illegal pornography, and covert meeting places and messaging services. The pervasiveness of the Internet provides easy access to dark-web sites from anywhere in the world. The growth of the dark web has been paralleled by an increasing number of anonymity web-overlay services, such as Tor, which allow criminals, terrorists, hackers, paedophiles and the like to shop and communicate with impunity. Law enforcement and security agencies have had only very limited success in combating and containing this dark menace. The aim of this talk is to present a systems analysis view of the dark web in order to identify possible approaches to controlling illicit activity.

Using System Dynamics Modelling to Understand and Address the Systemic Issues on Complex Engineering Projects

As our world becomes ever more complex, engineering solutions to meet our needs become more difficult to realise. These solutions are born through projects that, because of this complexity, have been increasingly difficult to deliver on time and to budget. There is not a week goes by without reports of yet another project disaster, or another embarrassment for government! What is going wrong? Our ability to design and construct complex engineering solutions is improving, mainly through the formal application of systems engineering, but there is another entity in play that is not benefiting from the same degree of attention — the delivery mechanism or, as it is more commonly termed the “project”. This project can be as complex as the engineering solution, with behaviour that is extremely dynamic in nature. The application of system dynamics modelling is currently the only way by which this behaviour can be understood and ultimately controlled. System dynamics may therefore be the missing ingredient for successful projects.

J-Value/ a Universal Scale for Health and Safety Spending

The J-value has been developed as a universal scale to measure and access health and safety expenditure in all sectors of the economy. Initial steps of deriving the J-value involve finding a suitable measure for the quality of life and determine the factors that influence the quality of life of an individual. It is being used in a number of different sectors, demonstrating its ability to produce figures for the value of a human life that coincide approximately with previous estimates, based on different approaches. It has also been proposed for use by decision makers on health and safety in all sectors due to its capability to translate a variety of cost-benefit formats onto a common and objective factor and its ability to interpret the amount of expenditure that is to be considered. It is also suggested that its adoption could lead to more consistent and better targeting of health and safety expenditure in all areas of the economy. Language: en

Application of Natural Language Processing and Evidential Analysis to Web-Based Intelligence Information Acquisition

The quality of decisions made in business and government relates directly to the quality of the information used to formulate the decision. This information may be retrieved from an organizations knowledge base (Intranet) or from the World Wide Web. Intelligence services Intranet held information can be efficiently manipulated by technologies based upon either semantics such as ontologies, or statistics such as meaning-based computing. These technologies require complex processing of large amount of textual information. However, they cannot currently be effectively applied to Web-based search due to various obstacles, such as lack of semantic tagging. A new approach proposed in this paper supports Web-based search for intelligence information utilizing evidence-based natural language processing (NLP). This approach combines traditional NLP methods for filtering of Web-search results, Grounded Theory to test the completeness of the evidence, and Evidential Analysis to test the quality of gathered information. The enriched information derived from the Web-search will be transferred to the intelligence services knowledge base for handling by an effective Intranet search system thus increasing substantially the information for intelligence analysis. The paper will show that the quality of retrieved information is significantly enhanced by the discovery of previously unknown facts derived from known facts.

WorldCIS-2013: Keynote speaker 2

Summary form only given. The deep-dark web is both surprising and sinister and accounts for in excess of 90% of the overall internet. Google and other search engines deal only with the indexed surface web. The deep-dark web hosts illegal markets, such as the Silk Road, malware emporiums, illegal pornography, and covert meeting places and messaging services. The pervasiveness of the Internet provides easy access to dark-web sites from anywhere in the world. The growth of the dark web has been paralleled by an increasing number of anonymity web-overlay services, such as Tor, which allow criminals, terrorists, hackers, paedophiles and the like to shop and communicate with impunity. Law enforcement and security agencies have had only very limited success in combating and containing this dark menace. The aim of this talk is to present a systems analysis view of the dark web in order to identify possible approaches to controlling illicit activity.

Semantic Approach to Web-Based Discovery of Unknowns to Enhance Intelligence Gathering

A semantic Web-based search method is introduced that automates the correlation of topic-related content for discovery of hitherto unknown intelligence from disparate and widely diverse Web-sources. This method is in contrast to traditional search methods that are constrained to specific or narrowly defined topics. The method is based on algorithms from Natural Language Processing combined with techniques adapted from grounded theory and Dempster-Shafer theory to significantly enhance the discovery of related Web-sourced intelligence. This paper describes the development of the method by showing the integration of the mathematical models used. Real-world worked examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with supporting performance analysis, showing that the quality of the extracted content is significantly enhanced comparing to the traditional Web-search approaches.

Learning to Exploit Tolerances: An Undergraduate Laboratory Exercise in System Design of an Instrument

A laboratory exercise is described that introduces the engineering student to design to meet a customer specification. The student learns to appreciate the system-engineering nature of design, where multiple objectives need to be satisfied. The design vehicle is one of the most conceptually simple instruments, namely a voltmeter based on a moving-coil movement. The student finds out how to reduce cost by making maximum use of the tolerance-forming part of the customer specification. He or she learns how both deterministic and statistical methods may be brought to bear. The statistical method applied may also be of more general interest to instrument designers working in industry.