Systems Engineering Organizational Strategy

There is a wide variation in the type, boundary, context, and purpose of organizations that will benefit from organizing to perform systems engineering and specific implementation details for organizing will depend on these and other factors. Given the extent of this variety and the corresponding implementation details unique to each situation, this knowledge area focuses on providing structured guidance for developing a strategy for organizing and providing guidance on the decision-making that is needed to tailor the guidance to a specific organization's needs. This guidance begins with a set of primary considerations for developing a strategy to perform systems engineering that include:

• What is the organizational purpose?
• What SE activities provide a value proposition for supporting this purpose?
• How should these SE activities be allocated among the various organizational entities?
• Who performs the SE activities within each part of organization?
• What competencies are expected from the parts of the organization in order to perform these SE activities?
• How does that part of the organization gain those competencies and what does an organization need to do to improve and how does it do it?
• How do those who perform these SE activities interact with others in the organization?

These considerations are largely driven by three factors:

• The organizational context in which the SE activities occur, including organizational purpose, value measures, and culture.
• The characteristics of the system which the SE activities support; for example, the size, complexity, primary design factors, major components, critical specialties and areas of life cycle, required products, etc…
• The phases of the life cycle in which the activities being performed; for example development, deployment, operations, or maintenance of a product or service.

In this discussion, the term "organization" applies generically to one or more of the following, each covered as a knowledge area in this part:

• Individuals
• Teams/Projects/Programs
• Businesses/Enterprises

Topics

While details for each type of organization are covered in the appropriate knowledge areas, this knowledge area covers the topics listed below:

• Value Proposition for Performing Systems Engineering
• Organizational Purpose
• Systems Engineering Governance

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