Tag: newsletter

February

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

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.

Social Media

Twitter

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

We mused at snow falling on 3SL towers, and pondered over the unusual uses of SysML and cheered at #CumbriaDay

January – Looking into 2019

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.

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?

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.

Social Media

Twitter

What are the predictions for the future? We liked this tweet from @AtkinsGlobal highlighting the International Air Transport Association @IATA ‘s   vision for the future.

We highlighted how you can have many categories in one field.

It’s Beginning to Feel A Lot Like….

• There should have been some acceptance tests associated with these requirements.
• The customer’s changes might be what they want for Christmas, but we’re unsure of the impact
• There might not be enough time to finish this project by the end of the year.
• We’ll forget the designs in our heads after a few party sherries and not know what to do in January.
• It’s time to relax and enjoy the festive period, our project is in Cradle.

Whilst we’re sure our customers align with the last point, its worth noting these seasonal holiday reminders.

• Make sure you have backed up your databases. By export or disk image – just in-case a power hiccough in bad weather causes a server fail.
• Backups to keep you data safe
• Storing on a NAS
• Ask your I.T. department whether there is any planned downtime over the break.
• Use the Cradle login message (here’s how to setup) to inform users.
• Send Alerts to all in the project.
• When viewing Tasks in Cradle, consider increasing the “Days before Start date” and “Days before Finish Date” in the schema so that you can see what’s going to start, or be due when you return to work.
• 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

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

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.

Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Well done if you managed to take advantage of our £50 per licence/product deal.

INCOSE

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

Twitter

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.

Remember, Remember

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.

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 then query on ‘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

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

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

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

Twitter

We love keeping an eye on what’s new in the field of engineering. The shropshirestar.com brought British engineering into the spotlight

We won Howden Power’s #WidgetOfTheWeek with our hierarchy diagram drawing tool

Shhhh, It’s a Secret

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

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

Twitter

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.

Help I’m Melting

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

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

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.

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.

Charity

We have a special “Secret (not!) Birthday Discount”  offer of £30 off single user prices and licences.

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!”.

Social Media

Twitter

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

And on a lighter note we mused at the practicalities of  #TakeYourDogToWorkDay.

Halfway

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?

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

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.

Charity

We have a special “Secret (not!) Birthday Discount”  offer of £30 off single user prices and licences.

However, those buying Cradle Enterprise licences can choose to donate £30 per licence bought to a charity of their choice.   Ts&Cs apply

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

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

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 !!

Social Media

Twitter

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.

And on a lighter note we celebrated Chocolate Chip Day.

May day, Mayday

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

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.

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

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

Twitter

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).

Hints of the Month

Last month’s blog articles included:

Looking at how to control duplicate expansions on a Hierarchy Diagram (HID). And how to control the rules that allow or prevent those links in the first place.

You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog

Happy New Year!?

Yes, I know it’s the April 2018 Newsletter. The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582. The switch by countries was gradual, with the UK changing in 1752. During the switch the UK lost 11 days in September, and the start of the year was moved to January the 1st. We covered some of the strange naming conventions in our October newsletter. Originally the first day of a ‘new year’ was 25th March, this sudden jump would have messed up financial institutions accounts. So they kept the start of the fiscal year more or less where it was, shifting by those same 11 days to 5th April. Or it could have been that the accountants were so drunk at Christmas they just couldn’t face doing the accounts when they returned to work. Take your pick.

So if you are lucky enough to be dealing with a new budget for the “new year” now’s the time to check you are getting value for money across all your projects. Are you still dealing with several different tools to manage your Requirements and model your Systems?
Could you consolidate these tools and methods by adding extra licences to your Cradle installation and then  on-boarding ^{(yuck -Sorry read that one in a trendy blog post somewhere)} the less enlightened?
On the other hand if you’ve been Spring cleaning and found your project a little out of kilter, you may realise that the management view you have over it,  is not as clear as it ought to be. Then maybe adding a Dash or Metric licence to Cradle could help with getting to grips on the health of your project. However we can help, don’t hesitate to call  us here in the UK or your local distributor.

Metrics

Measurements and collation of the results are an important management tool.

It is obviously important to manage and track the right thing. Using the ludicrous  quote “The majority of people involved in accidents were wearing white underwear….”, you may jump to the conclusion that brightly coloured pants will keep you safe. Of course this statement is completely meaningless without context because if white pants are the most popular colour you could make that statement apply to any topic.

Provided you are measuring sensible information, percentage of  Requirements that are Accepted, or Underway gives a really useful view about the maturity of your project.

In Cradle you can define any number of metrics, save and re-run them at a later date. A metric is made up of a set of elements, each element is a query to the database to retrieve item(s), and an analysis operation on these items. This could be a simple count, or a more comprehensive coverage analysis of attributes.  Available functions include:

• Item count
• Minimum value, Maximum value
• Averages/spread (mean, median, mode(s), variance (population-based), range, standard deviation (population-based) and semi-interquartile range)
• Total / Weighted total of values
• Range of values
• Pivot table for category values
• Coverage statistics

The returned values can also be further manipulated with  Metric calculations, combining values with basic mathematical operations. Delve into the help section for more information or read the flyer.

Cradle Features Coming Soon….

As we mentioned in February Cradle 7.4 is on the way. Look out for; New colouring options in (HID) Hierarchy Diagrams,  Additional Regex (regular expression) matches in queries,  Unique attribute checks……..

Social Media

Twitter

Yey! Our followers still steadily climbing, but will you be the one that pushes us over the 400 mark?? What happens when we get to 404, do we get Follower Not Found? ^{(Oh dear, sorry,  bad engineering joke crept in. Ed.)}

We read how conventionally CO is seen as bad, but there could be a route to making fuel.

We gave you a peek inside 3SL towers at some of the great staff we have.

We found ourselves hungry on St. Patrick’s day.

And took comfort that we were missed…..

Hints of the Month

Last month’s blog articles included:

We highlighted types of storage in Cradle, last month. Think of this too as a way to get tighter control over some of those files that form part of your Requirements set. Adding them to a Cradle item and then adding meta data to describe how they fit into your project.

We also looked at setting your model drawing preferences.

And to fit in with our Spring Cleaning, some housekeeping tips in Cradle.

You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog