SEBoK Users and Uses
The SEBoK is intended to be a resource that can help anyone understand more about systems engineering. Systems engineers should obviously benefit, but so can undergraduate engineering students, those new to the SE discipline, or people who work with systems engineers and want to understand more about what to expect from systems engineering activities. This article explores a variety of personas. Once you determine which persona best represents you, read on to get practical advice on how to utilize the SEBoK.
Personas
In marketing, "personas" are used to illustrate potential users or customers. Personas are fictional characters that represent a demographic of a target audience. For the SEBoK, we've developed personas that represent different types of people who we anticipate will utilize the SEBoK:
- Stueti – an engineering undergraduate student
- Hans – a new systems engineer
- Yan – an experienced systems engineer
- Jacquie – a chief systems engineer
- Juan – an organizational manager
Note that initial work on personas was published in (Hutchison et al. 2023). The personas published in this reference were built upon and edited to support this article.
An Undergraduate Engineering Student
Stueti is in her final year studying mechanical engineering at a public university. Her senior design project is a multi-disciplinary capstone, and she must work with students from the electrical and software engineering departments as well. At the first meeting of the capstone team, each student starts talking about their ideas to make their part of the project using the most advanced techniques and technologies available. They quickly start arguing about how to do this in the time and budget available. Her faculty advisor says that in order to be successful, they have to work together to create a useful product, which means that they can’t each focus on their own parts in isolation. Her professor states that they all need to come to the next team meeting prepared to discuss their project as a system. Like all good undergraduate students, when she gets back to her dorm, the first thing she does is Google “system” and she quickly gets lost in the results (there are over 16 billion, after all).
For Stueti, the SEBoK can provide a great way to get exposed to the idea of systems. In particular, Stueti could benefit from reading the articles in Part 2: Foundations of Systems Engineering , particularly The Nature of Systems, which will introduce her to different views on and core definitions of a system. From there, the articles in the Introduction to Systems Engineering knowledge area would be useful. Finally, Stueti should read the article Systems Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, which relates to this new subject area that she has spent several years learning. In her reading, Stueti might also identify a few references that she thinks will help her better understand this SE stuff and help her apply it.
This gives Stueti a better understanding of what her professor meant – that all of the different elements of the project (or system) must work together in order to achieve their project goal (and their ultimate goal of graduating).
As the capstone progresses, Stueti returns to the SEBoK to find additional resources as new issues come up.
A New Systems Engineer
Hans graduated with his master’s in computer science three years ago and has since been working for a large company in their IT division. The team he is on has been operating and maintaining the existing customer support system, which has become increasingly cumbersome and costly. As part of this work, Marcus’s manager noticed that he was always asking good questions, and several times Hans’s curiosity helped the team uncover problems that they had been unaware of. In addition, Marcus has exhibited “out of the box” thinking, which has helped create some novel solutions. Hans's computer science and programming skills are competent. The company is about to kick off a project to build a whole new customer support system. Based on his experience with the current system and his inquisitiveness, Hans’s manager asked if he would consider taking a role as the systems software engineer, reporting directly to the chief systems engineer on the project. Marcus is excited to take on new responsibilities, but other than a few brief interactions with systems engineers, he’s not sure what they do. He is set to start taking the company’s introductory systems engineering course in a few weeks, but he wants to start understanding more about it now.
Han’s manager recommends he take a look at the SEBoK in preparation for his upcoming course. Hans, feeling a bit nervous, decides to search the SEBoK for “computer science” and finds the page, Exploring the Relationship between Systems Engineering and Software Engineering. This is a page about a paper by the same title, which Marcus looks up to read later. In the SEBoK, he notices that this is used in something called, Software Engineering in the Systems Engineering Life Cycle. Marcus reads this article and finds a number of related articles on the relationship between systems engineering and software engineering, which highlight the relationships between the two. Marcus is now feeling more confident that this “systems stuff” isn’t completely different from what he has learned by applying his computer science degree on the job.
Hans continues to explore the SEBoK, finding a collection of articles about systems thinking, which he finds useful and which leads him to articles about the systems engineering process. He learns about lifecycle approaches and finds an article on agile systems engineering. He is very familiar with agile approaches from his work over the last three years. While reading the SEBoK, Marcus looks at the references and identifies 6 articles and 2 books he wants to read to get more familiar with SE. He is feeling much more confident about his ability to tackle the upcoming course and his new role and bookmarks the SEBoK for future reference.
An Experienced Systems Engineer
Yan graduated 10 years ago with a degree in electrical engineering and was happy to join a large company in her area helping to design their medical devices. After a few years, Yan was selected for an advancement program intended to help develop new systems talent in the company. As part of this, Yan completed her graduate degree in systems engineering last year. She is currently working as a lead designer on one of the company’s flagship products. She has taken all the courses her company offers around systems design and engineering and is looking for more resources to continue to develop her skills.
Yan is aware of the SEBoK and has read a few articles but has not used it often. She decides to search for “knowledge skills abilities” (KSA) as her company uses this term around performance time. She finds articles on enabling individuals, ethical behavior, and roles and competencies. She reads the roles and competencies articles and learns about several different competency models. The primary references point her to these models, and she decides that the NASA's Systems Engineering Competencies model seems to align well with how her company views systems engineering. She decides to look through the competency model and see what competencies she has and which she might want to work on (see “Systems Engineering Workforce Competencies”). The competencies around the lifecycle she is generally comfortable with, and she has had a few minor leadership roles, but some of the technical management competencies are less familiar. Yan decides that learning more about technical management will improve her skillset and make her more valuable to the company.
She skims the articles on “SE Management” in the SEBoK, and the overview content is pretty familiar. Looking through the works cited and primary references, however, she finds a few really useful references. This leads to the definition of technical management in the SEBoK Glossary of Terms, which points to a joint INCOSE/Project Management Institute (PMI) working group on the subject. Yan reaches out to this group and identifies further resources for self-study.
After reviewing the resource, Yan is now more familiar with the vocabulary of technical management and looks for related short courses to help her hone her skills. She, of course, is always looking for new ways to apply what she’s learned on the job.
A Chief Systems Engineer
Jacquie is a chief systems engineer at a mid-size electronics company. She has led many programs to success, coordinating hundreds of engineers, project managers, and specialists. Jacquie has recently been asked to step in and support the lead engineers in several smaller projects resolve some “knotty issues”. She has noted that in almost every case, the issues had two root causes: lack of systems perspective and lack of coordination between teams of different disciplines. Jacquie has seen several initiatives to move the workforce in one direction or another fail over her 18 years with the company, so is wary of top-down mandates saying that everyone needs to become a systems thinker or something similar.
Jacquie is a long-time user of the SEBoK and remembers that there’s a section somewhere about enabling systems engineers. She quickly finds the section in the Outline (Part 5: Enabling Systems Engineering) and notices a knowledge area on Enabling Businesses and Enterprises and starts reading. The articles on determining what capabilities organizations need and developing those capabilities are particularly helpful and lead her to a Harvard Business Review article on change management that is really useful. Armed with this information, Jacquie gets a group of her peers together to discuss the challenges and some potential solutions.
An Organizational Manager
The primary audience of the SEBoK is individuals working in the SE discipline. However, the articles are intended to be written in a way that will enable non-systems engineers to grasp the basics.
Juan is a mid-level manager at a large firm that makes major weapons systems for the nation’s defense department. The organization has recently launched an initiative that is intended to move the culture toward a more integrative and collaborative model. One aspect of this is a focus on systems and systems thinking. Leadership has emphasized how critical it is for all levels of management to really “get behind” this initiative for it to be successful. Juan has never heard the term “systems thinking” before and the only connotation he has with “systems” are the IT systems that are always giving him such trouble.
Juan Googles “systems thinking” and is immediately overwhelmed by the search results. He is inundated with definitions from companies trying to sell systems thinking services or training, universities advertising their programs, and blog posts, which could be by experts or by people who only think they know what systems thinking is. He stumbles upon something that links “systems thinking” to “systems engineering”, which is a term he knows, though he has never been and has no desire to be an “engineer”. He updates his search to include both “systems thinking” and “systems engineering” in Google Scholar to try to find more reputable sources. There are tens of thousands of results and, again, Jaun starts to become overwhelmed. He goes to a systems engineer who always says “hello” in the break room and asks him what to do. The systems engineer points him to the SEBoK.
In the SEBoK, Juan quickly finds a knowledge area on systems thinking and several articles and papers that he believes he can trust to give authoritative information. After reading through the articles and references, Juan now feels he has a basic understanding of what systems thinking is and he now understands why this is such a critical part of the company’s strategy for change. Juan now has the vocabulary and knowledge to support the initiative as a member of the management team.
References
Works Cited
Hutchison, N., A. Pyster, and R. Cloutier. 2023. "Using the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK)." in Verma, D. (ed). Systems Engineering for the Digital Age. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Primary References
Hutchison, N., A. Pyster, and R. Cloutier. 2023. "Using the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK)." in Verma, D. (ed). Systems Engineering for the Digital Age. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Additional References
None.