The Enduring Path to System Success: Investment in Quality Early‐phase Systems Engineering

Abstract

AbstractSystem stakeholders responsible for defining, delivering, and commissioning engineered systems often work in resource‐constrained environments. This means that it is not always possible to apply systems engineering processes as comprehensively as practitioners would like. The question then becomes where and when best to allocate systems engineering resources to maximize project success. A review paper that analyzed lessons learned twenty years ago highlighted inadequate early‐phase systems engineering effort as a major cause of project issues. This paper opens with a discussion of this review material and progresses to review contemporary materials. The conclusion drawn is that the quality of early‐phase systems engineering is as vital as ever to project success and that the recommended levels of expenditure on SE are unchanged. The newer work, however, provides us with important new information: guidance on the sorts of activities that provide the greatest payoff in the early stages of the lifecycle and what proportion of the SE budget should be allocated to each major area of activity. The foremost areas to resource are mission definition and project scoping, with systems architecting, technical analysis, and system design also featuring prominently. Requirements also features but not in terms of volume of effort rather in terms of the need to use good systems engineering and analysis to translate the high‐level originating needs (that rarely change) into the detailed technical requirements. Model‐based approaches are claimed to much better support early‐stage SE than older, document‐based approaches.