Developing a systems ConOp: For complex infrastructure upgrade programmes

The design and development of major products, systems or infrastructures entail conceptualisation, elicitation and articulation of a large body of requirements that is often captured as a narrative and presented in wordy documents and spreadsheets. Whilst the requirements are generally classified in terms of behavioural, functional and non-functional categories, the current methods in vogue in infrastructure procurements tend to lead to a myriad of issues from inconsistency, incompleteness, ambiguity, overlaps, gaps, contradictions and errors in articulation since these often originate from different stakeholders and interest groups in different formats and styles. The consequence of this is an unverified or non-validated set of requirements that tend to become the basis for design and delivery with wasteful and expensive efforts for redesign and post deployment modifications or protracted contractual disputes. The current approach also results in a large processing overhead for the delivery/contracting enterprises in structuring, classifying and prioritising the requirements that are couched in extensive narratives and formulating compliant conceptual designs and solutions using rudimentary matrices for demonstration of conformity. The challenge of demonstrating satisfaction of the requirements also often leads to capture and maintenance of these in large relational databases that become the forte of data/information specialists to manage. Added to these are the aspects of the requirements that are non-deterministic in nature and require specific processes and verification/validation activities generally addressed under the banner of systems assurance. Systems emergent properties such as safety, security, sustainability, reliability, maintainability, resilience etc. fall under the assurance umbrella and provide a major challenge to compliance and verification of the design and development activities. This paper revisits some the current deficiencies with the approaches in vogue in articulating, capturing, managing and communicating operational, system functional and behavioural requirements in large infrastructure upgrades and renewals projects and programmes. It elaborates a model based approach to this aspect of system realisation with a view to enhance completeness, coverage, comprehension, traceability, consistency, maintainability and transparency of requirements engineering in large complex projects and programmes.