Providing tailored heuristic advice to Systems Engineers

Complex;Difficult;Assessment;Heuristic;Advice;Approach;Principles

Difficulty Assessment Tools (DATs) have been used for many years to characterize a problem to provide tailored advice. An INCOSE-wide initiative has exposed at least 600 heuristics and counting. Previous work indicates that rationalizing and simplifying this set to make it a useful memorable set is likely to be intractable. This paper explores using a DAT to characterize a problem and provide a range of advice including heuristics advice to the users. To test this approach, 57 heuristics and 10 principles were scored and embedded into an online DAT. An experiment was conducted to determine if the discussion, ap-proach and heuristic/principles advice was relevant and/or useful. The results indicate that the discussion, approach and Heuristic advice provided were considered highly relevant by the users of the tool. The discussion was considered very useful, the approach advice somewhat useful and the heuristics considered a bit useful on average. The usefulness score was tempered by the perceived newness of the advice. The tailoring of the heuristics to the task was not noticeable by the users of the tool, though it aligned with the authors' expectations. The relevance and usefulness results indicate that Systems Engineers should use the DAT to inform their approach.