System Engineering Competencies for Space System Program Managers

Abstract

Space system program managers lead extremely complex development programs and are the ultimate programmatic and technical decision-makers. To be effective, they must have sufficient competence in program management as well as systems engineering (SE) to add the right people to the team, direct tasks, understand trades, assess risks, and manage results. To date, a description of SE competencies specifically for program managers has not been defined, so it is difficult to develop and assess the SE attributes necessary for program managers. This paper leverages the Project Management Institute (PMI) Program Manager standard (PMI, 2008), International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) SE Handbook (INCOSE, 2011), and the commercially available Lominger FYI Guide (Lombardo, 2009) of competence, along with other research, to define a comprehensive program manager competency model. The resultant competency description provides the competency names, description, and associated behaviors. This work fills a void in literature while unifying related source material and is useful in the selection, assessment, and development of space program managers.