It's widely believed that creep — changes to requirements that supposedly have been settled — is due to unclear requirements. This Advisor looks at project creep differently, enabling us to see that most creep involves requirements that should and could have been identified but weren’t, and that this happens so often that it’s a certainty rather than a risk.

Last year, Barry M. O’Reilly predicted that 2020 would be “the year that Agile got found out.” Well, we all know that 2020 took an unexpected turn. So, in this Executive Update, let’s look deeper into the outcome of my prediction and explore how Agile and agility, especially in the face of a global pandemic, has truly panned out since my “before the world changed” assertion.

Łukasz Paciorkowski and Piotr Karolczak present a digital twin maturity model that can help organizations make better decisions around the structure of digital twins applied to industrial applications. The model presents several capabilities that organizations can explore across several maturity levels.

Jacqueline Corbett, Adnène Hajji, and Sehl Mellouli discuss how digital twins can promote smart, agile, sustainable cities. First, the authors present the concept of organizational agility and the ways it promotes organizational success. Then, they explain how digital twin dimensions and capabilities support and contribute to organizational agility. The authors also present some examples and conclude with recom­mendations for cities in their consideration for the use of digital twins.

Jon Geater investigates the relationship of security and trustworthiness to digital twins. He looks at the possible security impact of the analog world on the digital world and how to address it. His application of the “nature versus nurture” analogy to digital twins is compelling. Geater discusses several security-related topics that organizations should consider, and he ends with a look at how to address digital twin security as we move forward.

Madison White explores how digital transformation in the transportation industry is being combined with automotive digital twins to produce the next generation of autonomous vehicles. She looks at the challenges facing production-scale deployment of digital twins, including digital twin accuracy, connec­tivity, data accuracy, interoperability/standardization, and trust/security. She concludes with the cost benefits of developing a vehicle using digital twins, including predicting maintenance, and thus lowering cost of ownership during the lifetime of a vehicle, and cleaner air.

Chloé Audigier and Dileep Mangsuli explore digital twins in the medical domain, specifically regarding modeling humans and their care. They explore the complexity of data related to various organs and scenarios, especially how models must be based on the behavior of many people yet personalized to a specific person. Medical digital twins can help predict therapeutic outcomes and how an individual will react to a particular approach. This is a promising field with endless applications and possibilities.

Sameer Kher starts us off with a discussion on the important topic of simulations. Simulations have been used for years in modeling and design. More recently, they have become a core aspect of digital twins, simu­lating outcomes during design phases and in using real data during operations. Kher describes the phases associated with applying simulation in digital twins as well as use of simulation in areas such as predictive maintenance. He concludes with describing how you build, validate, and deploy a simulated digital twin.