We will focus on importance of requirements and provide an introduction to the critical skills and characteristics of an effective dispatcher. It should be apparent from the material presented already that there is great power and effect in leveraging requirements activities to achieve Upgrade/Repair Simulation success.
As a concerned professional dispatcher you have the responsibility to bring essential facts and your recommended approach to your Site Visit Executive so incorporation effective requirements practices can be supported.
Dispatchers are in strategic position to improve Upgrade/Repair Simulation performance. Site Visit Executive provides focused and specific guidance that can have a huge payoff. By applying the approach recommended here, you can have a very positive impact on your project and organisation.
Making dispatcher technique composition explicit makes sure Upgrade/Repair Simulations run more smoothly. Dispatcher actions must be understood and valued by Site Visit Executive and Suits at the Pentagon—this job description should help!
Suggestions are provided concerning how to strengthen these characteristics. Consider these in the context of your own goals, as well as of your current assignments and responsibilities, and select one or a few characteristics to get better at each year. Yes, being an effective dispatcher involves learning many new/difficult skills. This report provides useful road map.
It’s apparent from all the reports we have submitted there are many different types of requirements. It helps to agree to use a selected few types. Agree with your Visiting Site Executive on the types that will be most useful. Use your Top 10 Lists, which provide defined and agreed-upon terminology. Use simple, understandable words. Write requirements that meet the criteria of a good requirement. Study the Top Ten lists we have provided if you aren’t already familiar with them.
Here, we suggest using checklist of 10 steps that comprise a procedure for gathering requirements. This may seem like a lot of steps, perhaps suitable only for a large, mature project. Actually, projects of all sizes and all levels of maturity will need to address these steps! When requirements collection approach is not effective, the stage is set for trashing technical effort during follow-on project activities, creating the need for rework and jeopardising the success of the project.
You can’t do everything, at least not at one time. Dust off your requirements plan. Develop reasonable approaches to deploy, implement, and institutionalise those best practices you consider appropriate for your project at your Job Site over a reasonable period of time. Collaborate with Site Visit Executive to prioritise the value of the best practices you decide to implement.
Write an action plan that will enable Site Visit Executive to implement them on Enterprise-wide scale. For each best practice, define actions and schedule required to implement it. Do this in collaboration with your Site Executive and contacts with Troops in the field. Gain their buy-in and support for the best practices you selected for your work week.
Communicate what you are doing by holding meetings during lunch in the Mess Hall. The main thing is to ensure you are moving together in concert with requirements of the Troops, not to have the largest number of best practices. Remember, commitment is the main ingredient to achieve anything of value.
We also provide for discussion of additional skills and information useful to dispatchers. It’s likely that you won’t need the information concerning all of these topics either immediately or at any one particular time. It’s also likely that you will need to know about most of these areas at some point in your work. You might consider trying out new techniques if your project is not currently applying them.
The approaches and techniques discussed in many of our reports should be used continuously on all projects. Others are more in the “nice to have but very important” category, such as estimation, improving and refining your facilitation skills, being a leader on your project, and pursuing continuous improvement.
There are many things we can do to create a pathway to address requirements problems highlighted by Troops in the Field. We aren’t pretending this is easy or that it can be accomplished quickly. Achieving the defined vision for equipment requirements utilised in Work Orders requires, however, that we do things differently. We expect you will commit yourself to making some useful changes to Upgrade/Repair Simulation processes.
You have been placed in strategic position to improve project results and success rates. Requirements are the basis for all of the follow-on work that is done by Troops in the Field. Improving the requirements practices being used can have a huge pay off. Be bold in offering your experience, energy & insights.
You will probably be able to improve the process as you proceed through the project activities if the process is always evaluated on timely basis. “Whoa!” you say, “I don’t even know where to go to ‘get’ a requirements process!” Yes, you do!
1. Review historical information & organisational policies, identify strategies to target users/stakeholders
2. Write/iterate requirements project vision & scope inspections of all requirements work products
3. Decide on stable, achievable long-term approach to be used on the project.
4. Establish mechanisms to advance real, innovative requirements from stated requirements.
5. Rewrite high-level systems requirements & proceed to initial steps, initiate/establish mechanism to control changes
6. Select automated tools and techniques & identify composition of the requirements repositories
7. Load, label & assign each requirement uniquely with attribute information
8. Perform requirements receipt on station & assign smart tracking strategies
9. Establish realistic, replicated approach for proof of concept & prototype
10. Complete field-level priority requirements receipt for first product release.