A SOSE Checklist and Mitigation List Applied to Three Case Studies
Patrick D. Allen, Martin Cury, Rachael Orzechowski · Systems Research Forum · 2006
Walker Royce (1998) defined two dimensions of project complexity: technical complexity and management complexity. In his book, Software Project Management, he defined a series of yes-or-no questions to help the practitioner determine whether, and the degree to which, a given project was simple or complex in these two dimensions. Keating et al. (2003) attempted to define the features of problems that are beyond complex projects. He and his co-authors defined five dimensions to a system of systems (SoS) project: technology, context, operations, geography, and conceptual frame. (Royce’s “management” dimension maps to Keating’s “context” dimension, although context covers a broader range of issues other than management.) In addition, SoS projects tend to involve a rapidly changing operating environment, changing operators and other stakeholders, geographically distributed development and operations, and different conceptual frames in the minds of the various stakeholders. Although these five dimensions are both useful and informative, the Keating paper did not take the next step, which was to define a series of yes-or-no questions that practitioners could ask to help determine whether, and to what degree, a given project is a SoS project. In this paper, we present a SOSE project assessment checklist that helps the practitioner ask and answer those questions. In addition to asking questions, we also created a spreadsheet by which the practitioner can “keep score,” thereby visualizing the degree of complexity in each dimension. We also provided a mitigation techniques list of options that can be useful in mitigating some of the SOSE features, and act as a starting point for brainstorming additional mitigation techniques. Lastly, we applied both the checklist and the mitigation techniques to three realworld problems, which we present here as case studies.