We made it through the Ides of March without any problems. However, it’s never good news if you leave your project to visions of a ‘Seer’. Whilst it would be nice to be able to have certainty over the outcome of a project, the truth is all we can do is be as prepared as we can and plan for those things we know. We also have to plan for the things that ‘might’ happen.
Risk
The things that we can’t predict for certainty are risks to the project or the business. Using a ‘Risk’ item type in Cradle is one way of recording the thoughts likelihood and severity of a risk. These risks could be cross-referenced to any of your project items. You could then add a ‘Mitigation’ item type and cross reference it to the risk. Add a few categories to hold risk re-evaluation dates and your more or less done. A query showing these linked items gives you a printable risk register.
Risk Register – “Beware the Ides of March”Risk Rule Set
With your choice of category values for the severity and likelihood and your choice of overall result, it is possible to set up a Cradle Ruleset to calculate the ‘result’ for your risk. We suggest you also add a further severity and likelihood column with values you perceive post mitigation in place. This will ensure you always believe the risk has been reduced following the application of your risk plan.
Beta Testing
Thank you to all the distributors and advanced customer currently testing the Cradle 7.5 software. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
We were amazed at a direct brain injection method for drugs to possibly reverse Parkinson’s disease.
Don’t forget you can always @ include @threesl on any of your engineering tweets, and we may re-tweet them.
…and Finally.
Circus
Last month 3SL again donated to Circus Starr “The Circus with a Purpose” ‘A touring circus boasting world-class, professional artists from across the globe. It was first founded in 1987 and provides free seats for thousands of disadvantaged, disabled or vulnerable children, whilst helping to raise much needed funds for local charities.’
Welcome to the shortest Gregorian month of the year. Or 新年快乐！3SL 祝愿我们的所有客户，合作伙伴和供应商 2019 吉祥如意！to our Chinese customers and friends.
However, just because it is a short month, there’s no excuse not to achieve quality work. Whether that be using the ancient Chinese elements of metal, water, wood, fire, and earth, or modern applications of finance, medicine, or software, good data management is key.
Same Data Different Views
Start Page – Simplification
Managing your project and having everyone using singly centred data makes sure you have control over the project. Too many times we hear that projects have failed because one department or section have been working on one part of a project and have not realised their requirements or data is out of sync with another. Being smarter with your data in 2019 is a great goal. As a customer you probably already have projects set up in Cradle. However, you may not have all the data related to your project in the central store. There are often a number of reasons that data ends up in disparate pots. Here, we try to offer solutions in some of those scenarios.
Scenario
Solution
Some staff shouldn’t alter anything in an item, but do need to see the information.
Ownership, Teams / Team hierarchies and Baselines are all used as part of the standard access control to items. Privileges control who can see what.
Not all staff are permitted to see the data associated with an item.
Use skills to make appropriate categories Read Only in the UI
The stages of the project are complex. It’s difficult to know where to find what.
Building Project Phases recognises the steps, queries, reports, matrices, actions and so forth that are associated with different periods of the project. Knowing that you are in the development stage and having all the appropriate queries grouped together in the Phase tree makes it easy to find the current work items.
Cradle screens are too complicated for some users who just need to see one aspect of the product.
Adding a Start Page which only presents the actions pertinent to a particular user / group of users, can vastly simplify the choices available to the user.
Some users just perform a limited number of tasks against an item. They don’t want huge menu choices.
View Commands allow customised menu options for actions on items shown in a query. (combine with a start page for an efficient led guide through your process minimising complexity)
Different tasks require different aspects of an item to be viewed.
Whilst Cradle offers many automated views and forms to get you up and running, they are all fully customisable. Try opening the view or form closest to your needs, modifying it and then saving it. These can be saved in ‘folders’ relevant to the user, type of user or for the whole project.
We’re not all in the office but still need to see project information.
Web Access allows worldwide connection to your Cradle project without the need for an installation. Just fire up a browser to gain access.
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Happy Birthday Buzz tweet
We were pleased to see what was achieved by engineers 40 years ago landing on the moon. Happy 85th Buzz. What do you think we will achieve this year, that will still be talked about 40 years hence? Let us know on social-customer@threesl.com
To the Romans ‘Janus’, for which this month is a special celebration, was the guardian god of portals, and gates, the patron of beginnings and endings.
The word appears to have derived from c. 1500, from the Latin Ianus, meaning “gate, arched passageway,”
The deity is said to have two heads one looking to the past and one looking to the future.
Janus
So why not make a new year’s resolution to ensure you modernise those remaining projects in your company? Take control and ditch the old, unlinked, discord of separate tools and repositories and ensure all the data is linked and traced in Cradle. From project beginnings to successful endings, from concept to creation and through your product’s life – look forward not backwards with Cradle.
Looking Forward
We’re hard at work implementing features for Cradle 7.5 giving you more ways to get your data in and out of Cradle. Follow our newsletters, blogposts and twitter, facebook and linkedIn pages to stay abreast of the updates coming in 2019.
Cradle Release
If you didn’t get a chance before the Christmas break, make sure you go into the new year with the latest version of Cradle – 7.4.2. This will ensure you have the latest features and the bug tweaks in place. To answer a common question that support are asked, “Yes you can have the new features included in a 7.4.n release for free if you have a 7.4 code.”
All Spent Up?
Cradle SAAS subscription product
Don’t forget if you need a cost effective way to bring Cradle on line for 2019 and have little capital budget left in your 2018/2019 pot…..
Cradle Subscriptions option is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product which is a cost effective way to get up and running with 3SL’s requirements management and systems engineering tool.
There are also different hosting options, for further information see the product announcement.
Team leaders should run queries with the owner set to staff who are on long vacations, so plans can be made to deal with issues involving their items while they are away.
Use Discussions on items to record thoughts and ‘To Do’ points rather than half a pad of Post-it® notes.
Cradle Subscriptions
Mini Poll
SaaS ‘v’ Traditional Ownership Poll
We asked you about subscription products. You answered our Mini Poll, and said that ‘horses for courses’ is the rule of thumb when selecting SaaS or conventional ownership. We’re happy to say Cradle is available in whichever guise suits your business.
Cradle Release
Navigation with MATRIX variables
The latest release of Cradle 7.4.2 contains a new Matrix feature. A matrix allows items linked items to be shown as a set of rows and columns with the cells representing the links between them. It is also possible to show the items in the rows linked to the items in the columns via a third item type represented in the cell. For example, rows representing requirements, columns representing results and the items in the cells representing the tests between the two. The new feature lets users filter the items shown in the matrix cells based on the value of a column or row item appearing in the cross reference attribute. This is set up as part of the navigation that is followed between items.
We have also upgraded our OpenSSL to use version 1.3 TLS.
There are a number of small bug fixes including diagram drawings, workflows, importing with overwrite.
As usual anyone with a current 7.4 code is entitled to download the latest release. Anyone with current maintenance is entitled to upgrade any previous version to this latest release.
We had a great time at INCOSE EMEASEC 2018 conference in Berlin and enjoyed meeting all those who visited us. Missed the conference or our stand? Don’t forget you can still download an evaluation copy of Cradle
Social Media
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We love keeping an eye on what’s new in the field of engineering. Did you realise how much the humble loo on the move has changed? #WorldToiletDay
We celebrated Saint Andrew’s Day by constructing a COD (Collaboration diagram) showing how the Picts and Scots faced the Angles.
There’s quite a bit to remember this month whether it’s the failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, or the war fallen.
“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot!” Might be a good way to cement a date in your mind we humans tend to like rhymes, songs, and mnemonics to help our brains ‘visualise’ an otherwise abstract date or fact. However, trying to remember what’s needed and when on a large project is really quite difficult. Especially when dates are not fixed.
Relative Date Query
Cradle offers a number of ways you can track your project one of which is querying on relative dates.
For example an item representing a ‘test’ that needs to be run could be set with a category of type date. You could thenqueryon ‘tests‘ that are due to occur (or should have occurred) before the end of next week. It is also possible to query on a range, say beginning of this month and end of next week.
For work breakdown items there are some built-in ranges which can be accessed on the Progress tab of query. This gives a planning view of where your project stands.
The Fallen
Remembrance
3SL join with our customers, friends and suppliers, on this armistice day, to take a moment to remember those who have fallen fighting for their countries. There is a special poignance this year, the 100th anniversary since the signing of the armistice treaty between first world war allies and Central Powers.
Cradle Subscriptions
Cradle SAAS subscription product
Last month saw the launch of an addition to the Cradle family.
Cradle Subscriptions option is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product that provides access to 3SL’s requirements management and systems engineering tool Cradle using remote servers. This means there is no need to install software on your own company systems.
Options
There are a number of bundles covering the most frequently requested configurations of Cradle. The choices reflect whether you are performing both Systems Engineering and RM, or just Requirements Management.
There are also different hosting options depending on the size/loads and locations of the servers. Choose between shared 3SL hosted or dedicated cloud environments. For further information see the product announcement.
Mini Poll
Please answer our Mini Poll, whether you prefer the:ownership, control and flexibility of software purchase,
simplified, outsourced benefits of a managed service.
don’t really mind, I just use it
there’s room for both…..
INCOSE
INCOSE
We’re at the INCOSE EMEASEC 2018 conference in Berlin Nov 05, 2018 – Nov 08, 2018. Come and say ‘Hello’ to us at booth 20.
Social Media
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British Engineering
We love keeping an eye on what’s new in the field of engineering. The shropshirestar.com brought British engineering into the spotlight
As we head towards Q4, both businesses and governments will be looking at their costs to date and their costs for next year. As we mentioned in last September’s newsletter, one way of controlling your project costs is to use Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) with costings associated with each element. Those costs are for the actual implementation of the elements of the project, materials or labour. However, every business has base running costs associated staff, buildings, machines and software.
Running Costs
How do you plan your yearly costs? What does your jurisdiction count as capital investment and what as running costs? Need a fixed price for a fixed period of your project? Do you have an IT department that is more wrapped up in red tape than a red billiard ball in a tin of red paint within a red (reusable of course) red carrier bag? Don’t like the installation cost of keeping up to date with the latest versions of software.
If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of the above, then SaaS could be the way to go. 3SL is hard at work putting our hosted software service provision together. Watch out for further announcements.
Mini Poll
Please answer our Mini Poll, whether you prefer the:
ownership, control and flexibility of software purchase,
simplified, outsourced benefits of a managed service.
Cradle Latest Version
The latest version 7.4.0.2 has all the latest 7.4 patches. If you’ve not downloaded and installed it, please consider doing so to ensure you have the best Cradle experience. Anyone with a 7.4 licence code is entitled to this update.
Fixes include;
An issue setting names for requirements and notes in the Item Properties dialog.
A glitch showing some RTF frames.
Exact match query not returning all versions.
An issue with historic blank alerts, and item ownership changes.
Opening parent diagram or deleting symbol could hang.
Document Publisher failed when checking for existing processes.
Web Access bug with LOGIN_UI_SHOW parameter.
Improvement in queries on RTF frames now supporting <null> and !<null> searches.
Better detection for Microsoft® Office 365 during installation.
However, those buying Cradle Enterprise licences can choose to donate £30 per licence bought to a charity of their choice. Ts&Cs apply
Social Media
Twitter
Hyper Loop
We love keeping an eye on what’s new in the field of engineering. The prospect of an airline speed train caught our eye. The vacuum in here is neither hand-held, vortex, bagged nor available at any supermarket / electrical retailer! However it will be required to shift vast quantities of air.
Cat in Cradle
And on a lighter note we mused at International Cat Day placing a cat in the #Cradle as an illustration in the use of images in diagrams as part of the MBSE (Model Based Systems Engineering) representation of a system.
Hack Green “Secret” Nuclear Bunker is no longer a secret. (Although some Sat Navs still have difficulty finding it!). The level of secrecy and ‘need to know’ that was maintained during the cold war is quite incredible. For most of us it’s not every day that we work with information that is that high in confidentiality. However, it is much more common that we deal with different levels of information depending on our role within a company. This could be personal information that may have a GDPR aspect, or financial information to which we are not privy, or confidential design information which as a sub-contractor we are not allowed to see.
When managing a project it is important to ensure each team member is only shown information that they are authorised to see.
Cradle provides many ways to control which information can be seen by each team member’.
Classification – This is a top level filter. You may only see items that match or are lower than your own classification.
Ownership/Privileges – A team hierarchy and the allocation of user privileges ensures that users can only access appropriate sets of information.
Item Types/Skills – If a user defined item type is assigned a skill, and a user does not posses that skill they are unable to see any items of that type.
Frames/Skills – Frames within an item can be restricted to users with a particular skill.
Categories/Skills – Categories can be hidden from direct view for users without a skill.
It is impossible to print a single document and allow some staff to see some pages and some pictures and others to see different ones. However, when you arrange your project in a tool, this control can be achieved quite easily. If you’d like advice on setting up Cradle to meet your needs, check out the help pages, if you are under maintenance contact support@threesl.com for advice or sign up for a training course.
Cradle Latest Version
If you’ve not tried the following features yet, here are some highlights from the blog.
Start page enhancements. Creation of Start Pages is even faster with a copy facility for panels and entries. This is helpful when you want to list a number of very similar commands and just tweak each one. Start Pages are a good way to customise your user interface and provide the necessary commands to a user as soon as they open WorkBench. It is possible to create different pages for different users or types of user. We know that sometimes Cradle’s comprehensive nature can be a little overwhelming for the occasional user. Using start pages to ensure your teams are shown the most appropriate set of actions for their daily work, removes any confusion. Combined with a phase tree to arrange stages/areas of your project end users can be guided to the information they need quickly and efficiently.
Split xrefs – We have to admit that this may not be the most exciting enhancement for many users, but for those that frequently create baselines it provides a speed enhancement and disk management benefit. The state of the cross references in a project are recorded each time a baseline is taken. Now they are created in separate directories, in a smaller file format. If you don’t intend to use Baseline Mode earlier directories could even be archived off from you main storage.
Charity
Discount code
There is still time to use the special “Secret (not!) Birthday Discount” offer of £30 off single user prices and licences. Or those buying Cradle Enterprise licences can choose to donate £30 per licence bought to a charity of their choice. Ts&Cs apply
Review Us!
If you are using Cradle in your projects, or if you have recently evaluated Cradle, please consider reviewing 3SL and Cradle on Capterra. It only takes 2-3 minutes, and we would really appreciate your feedback.
Social Media
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Penn State Inspiration
We love keeping an eye on what’s new with our customers and what’s changing in the engineering community. Strange that inspiration for better data controls should come from Mayonnaise…..
And on a lighter note we celebrated our neighbouring county’s special day with a cuppa! Yorkshire Day
YouTube
If you’d like to watch some explanatory and how-to videos about Cradle don’t forget to check and follow our YouTube channel here.
When it rains we complain, and now that it’s reached more than 28°C here at 3SL ‘towers’, in Cumbria, we’re all searching for ice creams and sharing a few minutes with our servers in their air conditioned room! However, a week ago, our servers nearly suffered as much as we are now when their air conditioning stopped. Switching to the backup plan of ‘essential only’ machines, we were able to continue working, but it did highlight the importance of planning and designing a robust system. Whilst we may all be able to consider the design requirements/constraints/limitations within our own field, the scope of the environment also needs to be considered. In modelling terms, these are the environment elements:
Actors in SysML and UML use case diagrams (UCDs, uc’s)
Environment in data flow diagrams (DFDs)
Environment in function flow block diagrams (eFFBDs)
Environment in process flow diagrams (PFDs)
Environment in architecture modelling PADs and AIDs
Environment in ADARTS’ software architecture diagrams (SADs)
These symbols represent those parts of the environment with which our system will interact, and provide the means to describe the external interactions that our system has outside it’s own scope In this case the range of the expected external influences exceeded expectations. It’s worth bearing in mind when designing; whilst you may implement fail-safes, redundancy and extra capacity based internal parameters, it’s sometimes the influences outside our control that have the biggest impact.
G-Cloud 10
G Cloud
We are pleased to announce that Cradle is available as SaaS through G-Cloud 10. Aimed at projects using both agile and more traditional phase-based processes, Cradle SaaS can be found on the UK government Digital Market Place Cloud Software applications under the Information and communications technology (ICT) services area.
Services
We are offering a range of packaged SaaS services that include Cradle licences, a pre-defined schema and intensive support from 3SL for both unclassified (IL0) and OFFICIAL (certified IL3) deployments full details of which can be found in our article Cradle Available as Packaged SaaS through G-Cloud 10 with prices start from £20 per user per month.
Cradle Latest Version
Collapsible Panel
If you’ve not tried the following features yet, here are some highlights from the blog.
Forms – Collapsible Panels – If you have complex amounts of information to deal with on one form, you can roll-up and collapse panels or areas on you Cradle form.
Alerts – Email Templates – If you want additional information, or style customisation, you can now send SMTP client based emails.
Email Alert
For example if when an item is ready for review, if you want the email to say “Please prepare for review of the following item. Which in two weeks time will be the topic of a full Fagan inspection according to company procedure” you can. Alternatively you could add “Hey folks I hope you’ll all welcome this new user to our project” to the new user alert!
Items – Attribute Sets – A “8mm, Stainless, BSW (British Standard Whitworth)” is different from a “8mm, Stainless, UTS (Unified Thread Standard)” bolt. If you are specifying these components as part of your design solution, you may want to ensure they are unique, there’s no point specifying the same component twice. However, you may want to query on all your 8mm fixings, so having each element as a separate category is really useful. Attribute Sets are a useful tool to ensure that groups of component attributes are unique.
However, those buying Cradle Enterprise licences can choose to donate £30 per licence bought to a charity of their choice. Ts&Cs apply
England!
People from several nationalities work in 3SL. Thankfully, none of our respective nations have been playing against each other in the World Cup.
After just securing victory over Columbia on penalties as we write this newsletter, and noting that for England to win a penalty ‘shoot-out’ is itself a rare event (thanks Germany!), we would like to join the thousands of others to wish everyone ‘good luck’ if your nation is still in the competition.
On behalf of the majority of us in 3SL UK: “England!”.
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Megaproject Tweet
We love keeping an eye on what’s new with our customers and what’s changing in the
community. You may all be aware of football at the moment, but can you envisage a power plant the size of 300 football pitches? Siemens can #LargeScaleEngineering
June, halfway through the year, its easy to measure and define when we reach that point. Fundamentally that’s because the length of the year is clearly defined and we can measure when we reach the 1/2 way point.
Projects are not that simple.
If we’re unlucky we have no idea where we are or how far through the pile of requirements we have moved.
In a better position we have an idea how many requirements we have and how many have been linked to design solutions and possibly how many of those have been tested. A dashboard can help you quickly visualise these measurements. The real problem, however, is knowing how much effort you have expended and how much is still needed. Numerically you may have completed 90% of your requirements, with 80% of your budgeted effort. Can the remaining 10% be completed with the remaining 20% budget?
Effort / Completeness
One method would be to assign an LoE (Level of Effort) to each of the tasks. This then allows a weighted metric to be produced showing the numeric percentage of completed design elements compared to the current weighted effort expended.
This example show that although there are only 13% of the Design elements to complete we expect there is 46% of the total work still to be completed. Better check the budget and required finish date pronto!
Cradle Version 7.4
Cradle 7.4
It’s great to see so many downloads of Cradle 7.4 and we hope you are enjoying the new features. We’re adding blog entries to cover these, and you can search for these using the blog tag “cradle-7.4”
If you’ve not had a new security code and have a maintenance agreement, request a code by email.
However, those buying Cradle Enterprise licences can choose to donate £30 per licence bought to a charity of their choice. Ts&Cs apply
Circus
Last month our we chose to make a donation to Circus Starr “The Circus with a Purpose” ‘A touring circus boasting world-class, professional artists from across the globe. It was first founded in 1987 and provides free seats for thousands of disadvantaged, disabled or vulnerable children, whilst helping to raise much needed funds for local charities.’
Banking Changes
Banking Changes
As we have said previously, there have been some changes in UK banking as some banks have been split so as to isolate traditional banking from investment banking activities. Barclays have confirmed the new SWIFT BIC code is BUKBGB22. Our sort code and account numbers have stayed the same but our IBAN numbers have changed. This is especially important to our distributors and overseas customers. Please contact salesdetails@threesl.com to request our IBAN numbers. Updates are posted here.
GDPR
GDPR
Our new policies have been released, if you didn’t see the last email please read Privacy Policy Update article.
If you’ve got any noteworthy GDPR stories / articles that would be worth sharing let us know social-GDPR@threesl.com !!
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Big Battery
We love keeping an eye on what’s new with our customers and what’s changing in the engineering community. This development is one BIG battery engineering challenge.
We most certainly mean May Day, not Mayday! But have you ever stopped to think of the origins?
May day can be traced back to the Roman goddess of flowers Floralia, whose day was celebrated at the end of April. As secular celebrations became more popular, and with the calendar of the day, the 1st of May marked the first day of Summer.
From flowers to maypoles and crowning of the May Queen, a celebration of fertility and new life is now more commonly linked to the early holiday in May. (BTW the UK office will be closed on the 7th May 2018 as it is a bank holiday). The celebration is also closely aligned in the USA with Labor Day, a celebration of workers rights to fair and just working practice.
On the other hand the Anglicisation of the French m’aider, meaning ‘help me’ is used as a verbalisation of S.O.S. We hope a phrase you never have to use. However, if you do feel your project is having a bit of a Mayday moment, maybe you need to ensure its all in Cradle and you have complete control of your requirements…….
Here at 3SL towers we’re celebrating the ‘New Life’ aspect with the birth of Cradle-7.4!
Cradle Version 7.4
Cradle 7.4
3SL are pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.4.
There are some really helpful new features to look out for, so watch the blog posts over the next few weeks.
Those with maintenance agreements may request to receive new security codes by email.
Discount code
Those with Single User licences for 7.3 or before, or those wishing to purchase extra licences, may want to keep an eye open for a 30th Birthday discount. I can’t say too much but you might want to take note of this code. Ts&Cs apply
GDPR
GDPR
Time is racing towards final implementations for GDPR.
Watch our website for the final policy updates. If you have any comments please get in touch. social-GDPR@threesl.com !!
Social Media
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Xenon Catcher tweet
We love keeping an eye on what’s new with our customers and changing in the engineering community. A ‘vacuum cleaner’ for Xenon caught our eye.
We looked at long distance communication BI (Before internet) #AmateurRadio Day 2018 with a SysML (Systems Modelling Language) sd (sequence diagram).
