Overview: Systems Engineers devote significant time to managing large requirement sets, including handling of evidence to verify and validate those requirements. Our solution simplifies the interface between the engineering and system functions, avoiding the repetitive and time-consuming activity of producing Excel based reports from requirements management tools for discipline engineers to action.
Context: Requirements management using Excel exports often leads to reporting of stale data, and misinformation when managing de-centralised spreadsheet revisions. While attempting to train discipline engineers to use specialist requirements management tools, is time-consuming and has proven to be a steep learning curve, as concluded from our internal study.
Purpose: To digitally transform the way discipline engineers interact with requirements managed by systems engineers. Automating the process of communicating requirements and collating evidence directly to and from tools such as IBM’s DOORS NG.
Approach: KBR have taken the simplicity of a spreadsheet to present pertinent requirements in a format familiar to discipline engineers using a dedicated web application as an exchange to push verification and validation evidence data directly into the requirements management tool. The application was developed by systems engineers using low-code development environment, relies on IBM DOORS NG RESTful application programming interface (API) for integration and requires initial configuration for the relevant project schema.
Insights: Integration proved to be quite challenging, not only in designing an intuitive user interface which streamlines efficiency and supports real time data interactions, but also in making the application accessible to external users, as well as preserving user authoring permissions for historical audit purposes. However, digital transformation does not have to be complex, it’s the large volume simple repetitive tasks that we should be aiming to automate first, leveraging simple solutions for maximum gain, before embarking on elaborate complex automations.