Enabling Businesses and Enterprises

Part 5 on Enabling Systems Engineering explores how systems engineering (SE) is enabled at three levels of an organization: the business or enterprise (hereafter usually just called "business" as a shorthand because a business is a specific type of enterprise that has sufficiently strong central authority and motivation to take steps to effectively enable SE. See Enabling Systems Engineering for more on this.), the team, and individuals. The Enabling Businesses and Enterprises to Perform Systems Engineering Knowledge Area describes the knowledge to enable SE at the top level of the organization. Part 3 Systems Engineering and Management describes how to perform SE once it has been enabled using the techniques described in Part 5. A business is itself a system and can benefit from being viewed that way. (See Enterprise Systems Engineering in Part 4.)

To download a PDF of all of Part 5 (including this knowledge area), please click here.

Topics

This knowledge area contains the following topics:

Systems Engineering Organizational Strategy
Systems Engineering Governance - who makes decisions about SE in the business to deliver value and how the soundness and performance of those decisions is monitored
Deciding on Desired Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises - what specific SE capabilities are needed? e.g., a business that creates cutting edge products would likely require very strong architecting capabilities, including modeling tools; a business that has a global development team would likely need a very robust collaboration toolset
Organizing Business and Enterprises to Perform Systems Engineering - which SE functions should be centralized? which should be distributed? how much SE should every engineer know?
Assessing Systems Engineering Performance of Business and Enterprises - how well is the business doing with respect to the needed SE capabilities?
Developing Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises - how will the SE talent be grown and acquired?
Culture - how does the culture of a business affect SE? e.g., a risk-averse business will likely use plan-driven SE processes; an entrepreneurial fast-pace business will likely use agile SE processes

Logical flow between topics

specifically, how to:

determine how to embed SE into the business; e.g., what type of teaming arrangement
decide which SE tools, methods and processes are needed, and how these might be tailored to given situations
define which SE capabilities and competencies are needed in the business
govern, control and improve the SE effectiveness of the business
develop those who do SE within the businessThe way in which they enable SE should be driven by those reasons, tempered by the context, culture, and other factors in which the business operates.

One illustrative flow between the topics is shown in the Figure 1 diagram, which is essentially a "plan-do-check-act" cycle (Deming 1994). In this figure resources and services includes items like the processes, the tools and methodologies, and the organisational solution to doing systems Engineering

Figure 1. Concept Map for Businesses and Enterprises Topics (Figure Developed for BKCASE)

Analyze Needs

Systems Engineering Governance sets the Systems Engineering Organizational Strategy, which is may be developed by Enterprise Systems Engineering or Capability Engineering activities.
The business assesses what SE capabilities it needs to fulfill its Organizational Purpose; (see Deciding on Desired Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises).

Organize to Perform

The business decides how to organize to perform SE, allocating responsibilities and resources to the various actors responsible for SE activities, and defines the resources (e.g processes, methods and tools) (see Organizing Business and Enterprises to Perform Systems Engineering)

Perform Systems Engineering

SE is performed in support of business products and services (see Systems Engineering and Management in Part 3)

Assess Performance; Determine Gaps Versus Needs

Performance is assessed (see Assessing Systems Engineering Performance of Business and Enterprises )
Any gap between needed and achieved performance is identified.

Develop Business Capability

If a gap in SE capability identified, measures are taken to develop or improve the capabilities using the available levers to:

Develop, redeploy or obtain new facilities, tools, services, and individuals;
Improve culture;
Adjust organization;
Chnage or improve processes and methods used to conduct SE;
Adjust and align measures, goals and incentives;
Adjust the definition of the required capabilities;
If necessary, renegotiate scope, context, purpose, responsibility and accountability.

(See Developing Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises)

The way the business prepares to perform Systems Engineering needs to be tailored according to the specific situation and will depend greatly on the level of understanding of the added value of systems engineering, as well as the organization's maturity and homogeneity.

This Knowledge Area discusses the implementation of SE in business and in enterprise , and is also relevant to extended enterprises and to projects that involve multiple organizations. This latter case is a particularly difficult challenge because the teams within the project have duties both to the project and to their parent business and enterprise, and must fit into both cultures and process environments.

The detailed topics in this Knowledge Area go into further detail on how a business determines and prioritizes the SE capabilities it needs (Deciding on Desired Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises), organizes to do Systems Engineering and integrates SE with its other functions (Organizing Business and Enterprises to Perform Systems Engineering), assesses SE performance (Assessing Systems Engineering Performance of Business and Enterprises), develops and improves its capabilities through organizational learning (Developing Systems Engineering Capabilities within Businesses and Enterprises) and the impact of Culture.

Goals, Measures and Alignment in a Business

The alignment of goals and measures within the business strongly affects the effectiveness of the SE effort, and the benefit delivered by SE to the business, and needs to be carefully understood. For example:

(Blockley, D. and P. Godfrey. 2000) describes techniques used successfully to deliver a major infrastructure contract on time and within budget, in an industry normally plagued by adversarial behavior.

Lean thinking (Womack and Jones 2003; Oppenheim et al. 2010) provides a powerful technique for aligning purpose to customer value – provided the enterprise boundary is chosen correctly and considers the whole value stream.

(Fasser, Y. and Brettner, D. 2002, 18-19) sees an organization as a system, and advocate three principles for organizational design: “increasing value for the ultimate customer”, “strict discipline”, and “simplicity”.

EIA 632 (EIA 1999) advocates managing all the aspects required for through-life cycle success of each element of the system as an integrated “building block”. Similarly, (Blockley 2010) suggests that taking a holistic view of “a system as a process” allows a more coherent and more successful approach to organization and system design, considering each element both as part of a bigger system of interest and as a “whole system” (a “holon”) in its own right.

(Elliott et al. 2007) advocates six guiding principles for making systems that work: “debate, define, revise and pursue the purpose”; “think holistic”; "follow a systematic procedure”; "be creative”; "take account of the people”; and “manage the project and the relationships."

For organizations new to SE, the INCOSE UK Chapter has published a range of one-page guides on the subject, including http://www.incoseonline.org.uk/Documents/zGuides/Z2_Enabling_SE.pdf (Farncombe and Woodcock 2009) and http://www.incoseonline.org.uk/Documents/zGuides/Z3_Why_invest_in_SE.pdf (Farncombe and Woodcock 2009).

References

Works Cited

ANSI/EIA. 2003. Processes for Engineering a System. Philadelphia, PA, USA: American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/Electronic Industries Association (EIA). ANSI/EIA 632‐1998.

Blockley,D. and Godfrey, P. 2000. Doing It Differently – Systems For Rethinking Construction. London, UK: Thomas Telford, Ltd.

Deming, W.E. 1994. The New Economics. Cambridge, MA, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Centre for Advanced Educational Services.

Elliott, C. et al. 2007. Creating Systems That Work – Principles of Engineering Systems for The 21st Century. London, UK: Royal Academy of Engineering. Accessed September 2, 2011. Available at http://www.raeng.org.uk/education/vps/pdf/RAE_Systems_Report.pdf .

Fasser, Y. and D. Brettner. 2002. Management for Quality in High-Technology Enterprises. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons-Interscience.

Farncombe, A. and H. Woodcock. 2009. "Enabling Systems Engineering". Z-2 Guide, Issue 2.0. Somerset, UK: INCOSE UK Chapter. March, 2009. Accessed September 2, 2011. Available at http://www.incoseonline.org.uk/Documents/zGuides/Z2_Enabling_SE.pdf.

Farncombe, A. and H. Woodcock 2009. "Why Invest in Systems Engineering". Z-3 Guide, Issue 3.0. Somerset, UK: INCOSE UK Chapter. March 2009. Accessed September 2, 2011. Available at http://www.incoseonline.org.uk/Documents/zGuides/Z3_Why_invest_in_SE.pdf.

Oppenheim, B., E.M. Murman, D.A. Secor. 2010. Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering. Systems Engineering. 14(1): 29-55. Accessed on September 14, 2011. Available at http://cse.lmu.edu/Assets/Lean+Enablers.pdf.

Womack, J. and D. Jones. 2003. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised Edition. New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster.

Primary References

Blockley,D. and Godfrey, P. 2000. Doing It Differently – Systems for Rethinking Construction. London, UK: Thomas Telford, Ltd.

Elliott, C. et al. 2007. Creating Systems That Work – Principles of Engineering Systems for The 21st Century. London, UK: Royal Academy of Engineering. Accessed September 2, 2011. Available at http://www.raeng.org.uk/education/vps/pdf/RAE_Systems_Report.pdf.

Additional References

INCOSE. 2011. Systems Engineering Handbook: A Guide for System Life Cycle Processes and Activities, version 3.2.1. San Diego, CA, USA: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), INCOSE-TP-2003-002-03.2.1.

ISO/IEC 2008. Systems and Software Engineering -- System Life Cycle Processes. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organisation for Standardisation / International Electrotechnical Commissions. ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2008.

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