Reviews

Reviews play a very important role in ensuring quality and assisting your peers, writers, students and others to achieve their best. I take reviews very seriously in my every day work and always ensure that my roles involve reviewing materials. I also devise business processes, associated workflow and templates for the review processes. This Web page gives a flavour of some areas I have done extensive reviews on and/or care about.

RFI, RFP, RFQ

Too many acronyms!, They are called TLAs! (Three Letter Acronyms): Anyway, RFI, RFP, RFQ stand for request for information, request for proposal and request for quotes. These are typical steps you need to go through if you need to order products, services from suppliers. I have been involved in several projects involving RFIs, RFPs and RFQs. My main involvement has been on designing the decision-making process; that is articulating the processes, establishing the criteria for selection (based on technical requirements), assigning weights to requirements, defining score templates and validating scores - quantitative and qualitative decision making. I usually design simple tools linked to the review process (often based on MS Excel spreadsheet) and I am in most cases one of the 2 or 3 independent reviewers.

FTR and Peer Reviews

One of the most neglected tasks in many companies (apart from rigorous testing, but that is another chapter!). I have seen so many documents that bear critical designs, commercial analysis and decisions that go almost unreviewed, just bearly signed off on Friday at 5pm, when the document is emailed and the deadline for sign off is 30 minutes later!. It is also the case thet documents are emailed weeks in advance and never get the right attention for review! Anyway, FTR stands for Formal Technical Reviews and I have been FTR coordinator for several large projects. Again, here I tend to design, the provess for the FTR, the templates for completion and sign-offs. - it is all about prevent rather than cure, whilst being pragmatic rather too detailed, long time..) - Investment proposal reviews (stock markets submissions) as well as inv. club web sites.

Editorships

I have taken the role of editor for two major conferences;

• Co-editor and co-chair of the UKPEW'01 workshop (UK Performance Engineering Workshop 2001 - see publications 2001.
• - Editor-in-chief for the AMW'96 conference (Abstract Machine Models for Parallel and Distributed Machines Workshop) - see publications 1996.

PhD examiner

I have been invited on several occasions to act as PhD external examiner, some recent examinations:

University of Glasgow, March 2006, thesis on Simulation-based enhanced PCI scheduling algorithms.
• University of Glasgow, May 2003, thesis on QoS architecture for system-level interconnect.
• University of Hull, December 2002, thesis on distributed real-time systems.
• Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL) Lausanne, December 2001, thesis on QoS differentiated Services.
• University of Hull, March 2000, thesis on middleware solutions.
• University of York, October 1999, thesis on dynamic load balancing systems.

Refereeing

Between 1993 and 2002, I have been a referee for several scientific and engineering journals and international conferences, notably the annual IFIP ATM Workshop series, Performance Engineering workshops (UKPEWs), Performance conferences, and IEE Distributed Systems Journal. I have also been reviewer for EPSRC (government research agency) project proposals.

As well as PhD examination, BSc examinations (projects and papers).
- investment proposal reviews; web sites;