Tom Gilb's Competitive Engineering

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Background

Back in 2004, I was employed by a large investment bank in their FX e-commerce IT department as a business analyst. The wider IT organisation used a complex waterfall-based project methodology that required use of an intranet application to manage and report progress. It superficially appeared to lock down development risk by imposing a structured, complex series of templates, procedures and sign-offs at all stages through initiation, analysis & design, development, testing and deployment. It required estimation and tracking of future resource spend (almost exclusively person-hours and delivery dates). However, it's main failings were that it almost totally missed the ability to track delivery of actual value improvements to a project's stakeholders, and the ability to react to changes in requirements and priority for the project's duration. The toolset generated lots of charts and stats that provided the illusion of risk control. but actually provided very little help to the analysts, developers and testers actually doing the work at the coal face.

Recognising that process improvements at the level that really mattered were needed, they looked at outside help to inject new ideas. That led to my first introduction to Tom Gilb, and the set of ideas , concepts and tools that he has collectively called "Competitive Engineering". During a 5-day course, Tom and his son Kai led us through the concepts of quantified performance objectives, impact estimation, specification quality control and evolutionary project management. These concepts seems to crystalise and reinforce more vague "common-sense" methods I had picked up in my career to date, particularly going back to my first job working on real-time command and control systems in the defense industry .

Inspired by these ideas, I proceeded to successfully apply many of the ideas in specifications and projects thereafter. Since leaving the bank in 2007, I have continued to introduce and apply competitive engineering methods in many other organisations and projects, continually learning and trying to improve. The ideas documented in the Specification Cookbook are largely inspired by Gilb's work.

Competitive Engineering - The Book

In 2005, Gilb published "Competitive Engineering", subtitled "A Handbook For Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering, And Software Engineering Using Planguage". The book provides a comprehensive description of how to apply Gilb's concepts to any software project. The focus is on practical guidance, tools and advice so that you can pick out individual ideas and apply to your own working environment; more of a SDK than a formalised project management methodology. There is a lot of information packed into its pages; the emphasis is on useful content rather than unnecessary verbage. Each Chapter is presented with the same 10 subsections, making it straightforward to look-up the information you want. The book also includes a large Glossary of concept definitions which is published with a fair-use license.

Chapter 1 - Planguage Concepts and Control

The book dives straight in with an overview of the fundamentals of competitive engineering, called the "Planguage" framework, based on the plan-do-study-act process cycle. It introduces the key concepts and defined terms (e.g. "rules", "definition", "requirement") in a basic Planguage parameters, concepts table. It provides a powerful list of "12 Tough Questions", to help in controlling any kind of project risk, to find out what people really know, and don't know. Examples include:

  • Numbers - Why isn't the improvement quantified?
  • Doubt - Are you sure? If not, why not?
  • Evidence - How do you know it works that way? Did it 'ever'?
  • Proof - How can we be sure the plan is working, during the project, early?

A further treatment of this list is given in [www.gilb.com/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=24 this paper (pdf)].

Chapter 2 - Introduction to Requirements 'Why?'

This chapter provides an overview of system attributes (function, performance, workload capacity, resource, design) and the different types of requirement:

  • Vision - a leadership statement of the goals ("We will be #1 in XYZ in 3 years")
  • Function - what the system does
  • Performance - how "good" the system has to do the Functions
  • Resource - targets and constraints on any "cost" associated with building or operating the system
  • Design Constraint - explicit unmoveable restriction regarding design choices
  • Condition Constraint - other conditions that must be fulfilled or not (e.g. legal, regulatory).

Then a series of Rules and examples are proposed governing specification of requirements.

Chapter 3 - Functions 'What Systems Do'

Describes in much more detail how to think about what a system does (its "Functions"), emphasising the importance of separation of Function "What" from Design "How" and Performance "How well". For example in trading applications, Functions are what a trader would have to do to manage orders if they just had to use pen and paper (just like the good old days!). The chapter sets out principles of function specifications and several worked examples.
Note that most specs would stop here, if at all, and then dive into design .. and we are only on chapter 3!

Chapter 4 - Performance 'How?'

One of the most interesting chapters of the book (worth the entrance fee on its own imho), focuses on one of the key ideas behind Planguage: How to specify "How good" a given performance attribute should be, by specifying quantifiable scales of measure. Attempting to formally answer this question is then central to the other techniques of impact estimation tables, Evo project management that follow later in the book. Think of all the "ilities" that crop up in normal specs: "need better usability", "maintainability", "flexibility" …. yes, but what does that actually mean? How do those statements help to decide the designs we need to implement? This chapter introduces principles, rules and examples to help put numbers and target levels ("past", "goal", "stretch", "fail") that force stakeholders to think about the level of quality improvement they require for a given set of resources being allocated to the project (money, effort etc).

Chapter 5 - Scales of Measure 'How to Quantify'

Putting numbers to seemingly amorphous concepts as "usability" and "flexibility" is hard, and so this chapter follows on from the introduction in Chapter 4 to present concrete analysis techniques and ideas to help actually come up with useful scales of measure which can then be used to guide the project deliverables during its development lifecycle. Even better, Tom Gilb has made this chapter freely available on his website!

Chapter 6 - Resources, Budgets and Costs 'Costs of Solutions'

This chapter provides treatment for the analysis of the resources, resource requirements ("budgets") and costs. It emphasises the benefit of having quantified performance *and* resource requirements in maintaining control over costs (using tools like Evo and Impact Estimation tables). Design to cost, by selecting designs that fit within the committed budgets, then using the Evo method for the project to ensure the maximum "benefit" is delivered for the resources spent on it, improving cost estimates by learning during early, frequent benefit deliveries.

Chapter 7 - Design ideas and Engineering 'How to Solve the "Requirements Problem" '

This chapter argues for Design Engineering: the systematic evaluation of designs against all relevant stakeholder function, performance and resource requirements. To make the initial point it includes a version of the classic swing-design cartoon! As does the rest of the book, it provides a lot of practical ideas, such as suggestions on how much information to add to a Design Specification at the Idea / evaluation stage vs the detailed design carried out in Evo steps (see Figure 7.3 in the chapter), and a process by which to identify and evaluate design ideas. The chapter finishes with an interesting treatment of evaluating "priority", and why using Planguage concepts can provide much higher levels of objective control over priority setting.

Chapter 8 - Specification Quality Control 'How to know how well you specified'

This Chapter almost stands on its own as a method for the control of quality of any typical output of a project (any document or artifact), but focussed on specification quality. SQC is a method of engineering process control through sampling measurement of specification quality. It presents a "full" and "lite" inspection process variants. If you recognise the classic "cost curve of bug fixing", then SQC immediately justify its upfront costs by systematically reducing defects even before coding has started! By insisting on Rules for writing specs to be published, and then only inspecting a sample of the full document (e.g. 1 page of 300 non-commentary words per page) against those Rules only, you can efficiently estimate the number of Defects across the whole document. This chapter provides a lot of practical guidance with this process, including templates for inspection forms. Tom Gilb has previously published a book dedicated to software inspections.

Chapter 9 - Impact Estimation 'How to understand strategies'

This chapter presents one of the key risk control tools in the Planguage competitive engineering method; that of the Impact Estimation (or "IE") table. An IE table simply has a list of "designs" along the top, and a list of stakeholder performance objectives and resource costs down the side. At each intersection of idea and objective, you write the estimated improvement towards the goal or estimated spend of resource in quantative terms. Summing these improvements / costs for all the objectives gives a feel for how "valuable" the design idea is; by summing the same estimates across all design ideas you can see if you have thought of sufficient solutions to achieve the goals. By dividing the sum of the improvement benefits by the sum of the related resources spend, you can get a rough cost/benefit ratio for each design idea, thus giving key insights to the cost vs benefit for multiple competing solutions or design ideas against your key stakeholder objectives and resource budgets. The point of trying to write this in a table enables a more objective, evidence-based decision-making approach, that crucially accounts for both the cost (which is the usual focus of IT project management!) and benefits (to the stakeholders), which is often missed completely, or poorly understood.

Chapter 10 - Evolutionary Project Management 'How to Manage Project Benefits and Costs'

Finally, Chapter 10 presents a summary of the Evo project management methodology, which ties together the concepts in the rest of the book. Based on the well-known Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, Evo demands:

  • Early delivery of results to stakeholders
  • Frequent delivery of results to stakeholders
  • Small increments or ('steps')
  • Useful-to-stakeholder steps
  • Sequencing of steps according to degree of stakeholder benefit, preferably the most profitable first.

Once you have your function requirements and quantified performance objectives, and design ideas evaluated using IE tables, you embark on a series of short Evo steps, which rapidly goes through design, development, testing and implementation to get early feedback from the stakeholders themselves. The next Evo step is then adjusted (maybe re-do the step again, or select another step now you have learnt more by trying to deliver the current step). During each step, you are actually *encouraged* to go back and re-write any of the previous analysis and design specs as further stakeholder feedback is received.

Glossary

The last 1/3 of the book itself includes a comprehensive formal glossary and definitions set for the Planguage concepts; I think of it as a domain-specific language for business analysis and project management. It is published under a separate permissive license which encourages the wider use of its contained ideas. A live version is also available on Gilb's site.

Conclusion

The proof is in the pudding; I have used Evo (albeit in disguise sometimes) on two large, high-risk projects in front-office investment banking businesses, and several smaller tasks. On the largest critical project, the original business functions & performance objective requirements document, which included no design, essentially remained unchanged over the 14 months the project took to deliver, but the detailed designs (of the GUI, business logic, performance characteristics) changed many many times, guided by lessons learnt and feedback gained by delivering a succession of early deliveries to real users. In the end, the new system responsible for 10s of USD billions of notional risk, successfully went live over one weekend for 800 users worldwide, and was seen as a big success by the sponsoring stakeholders.

I would recommend this book to any business analyst or project manager working to deliver complex IT systems. Further material is available on Gilb's website at http://www.gilb.com.

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