Dr Bruce Elliott MA PhD CSEP CEng MIET MINCOSE MBCS

Dr Bruce Elliott

School of Government
Birmingham Leadership Institute
Honorary Associate Professor

Contact details

Email
b.elliott@bham.ac.uk
Address
Birmingham Leadership Institute
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Supporting the BLI's educational programmes and researching decision-making in large engineering project.

Qualifications

  • Chartered Systems Engineering Professional, 2015
  • PhD in Engineering, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, 2014
  • Chartered Engineer, 2004
  • BA in Mathematics (subsequently converted to MA), University of Cambridge, 1980

Biography

Joined the University in 2021 after a 40 year career in industry as a software engineer, systems safety engineer and systems engineer, mostly in the rail sector.

Teaching

Supporting the BLI's educational programmes

Research

Research interests

Interested in improving the outcomes of large rail projects. Believes that there is significant scope for improvement. In his PhD research Bruce looked at ‘change latency’ which is the lag between having sufficient information available to be able to see that a change of direction on an engineering project is desirable and actually taking a decision to make that change. His PhD research showed that change latency could be very high on rail projects (years). As the cost of making a change is known to escalate with delay and the cost of change is known to be a significant proportion of the cost of engineering projects, this all suggests that taking steps to reduce change latency could save a lot of money. His research also suggested that systems engineering has the potential to reduce change latency but that there are limits to what can be achieved with systems engineering alone. 

Other activities

  • Member of the organising committee for the INCOSE UK Rail Interest Group
  • Review for applications for Chartered Systems Engineering Professional status

Publications

Elliott, B. (2014) The Benefits of Adopting Systems Engineering Approaches on Rail Projects, PhD thesis, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, April 2014

Elliott, B., Schmid F., Shannon I. (2014) The seven myths of railway systems engineering, Railway Gazette International, September 2012

Elliott, B., O’Neil A., Roberts C., Schmid F., Shannon I. (2012)Overcoming Barriers to Transferring Systems Engineering Practices into the Rail Sector, Systems Engineering, Volume 15, Issue 2, Summer 2012

Elliott, B., Panter G. (2010) An Initiative to Strengthen Guidance on the Systems Engineering of Systems which are Already in Service: First Progress Report, Proceedings of the INCOSE International Symposium, Chicago, July 2010

Elliott B., (2007) Yellow Book 4, IRSE News, Issue 130 December 2007 / January 2008

Elliott, B. et al (2008) Getting the Message Across - Creating Accessible Guides to Promote the Adoption of Systems Engineering Good Practices, Proceedings of the INCOSE International Symposium, Utrecht, July 2008

Elliott, B. (2003) Creating an Environment for Making Better Decisions about System Safety, Proceedings of the 21st International System Safety Conference, Ottawa, August 2003