Capability Engineering

Capability engineering perspectives

The term capability is widely used across many industrial sectors and has begun to take on various specific meanings across, and even within, those sectors. Terms such as capability-based acquisition, capability engineering and management, Through Life Capability Management, capability sponsor, etc. are now ubiquitous in defense and elsewhere. Henshaw et. al. (2011) have identified at least eight worldviews of capability and capability engineering and concluded that the task of capability engineering is not consistently defined across different communities. Nevertheless, there are some common statements that one can make about capability engineering and its relationship to systems engineering.

Capability is the ability to do something; it is not a synonym for a system function or system purpose. A corollary of the statement above is that capability engineering is significantly different from product systems engineering and broader than (though it incorporates) the process perspective of systems engineering.

Capability engineering is very similar in scope to views of systems engineering such as Ring’s Value Cycle (Ring 2002) and layers 1-4 of Hitchins’ Five Layer Model (Hitchins 1994). Indeed, Capability engineering is the overarching approach that links value, purpose, and solution of a systems problem. As such, capability engineering comprises mindset (holistic thinking, assumptions), trade-offs, design, processes, values and policy, and outcomes. The processes for capability engineering are similar to traditional systems engineering, but the mindset and system boundary are different.

Capability is realised through a combination of components that include hard (equipment) and soft (people and processes) systems together with supporting services and infrastructure.

The relationship of capability to systems of systems can be colloquially summarised as Capability is an emergent property of systems of systems.

THE ABOVE TEXT IS A PLACEHOLDER

Services view of SoSE

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