Systems Engineering Organizational Strategy

There is a wide variation in the types of organizations that will benefit from organizing to perform SE activities. For example, every organization has purpose, context and scope as defined by its stakeholders, customers, and employees, and modified by which of its activities turn out to be most valued. Given the extent of the variety of organizations, specific implementation details for organizing will depend on many factors too numerous to cover in a guide of this type. Therefore, rather than cover the corresponding implementation details unique to each situation, this knowledge area focuses on providing structured guidance for developing a strategy for organizing for performing SE, and making the right decisions needed to tailor the guidance to a specific organization's needs. The guidance begins with a set of primary considerations for developing a strategy to perform SE 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?
• 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?
• Who performs the SE activities within each part of organization?
• 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 are being performed; for example development, deployment, operations, or maintenance of a product or service.

The organization’s strategy, whether deliberate or emergent, covers how the organization aims to achieve its purpose within its context and scope. The structure of the organization defines how it has chosen to allocate resources and responsibility to deliver value. SE at the organizational level aims to develop, deploy and enable effective systems engineering to add value to the organization’s business. Please note, depending on the perspective and needs of the reader, the term "organization" may apply to one or more of the following, each covered as a separate knowledge area in this part of the guide:

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

That is, the idea of “purpose, context and scope” can be used recursively to work down through the levels of organization. Each organizational level sets or constrains purpose, context and scope for the level below (implicitly or explicitly, formally or informally), allocates responsibility and resources, provides supporting services, and derives benefit as a result.

An organization is itself a kind of system, so much of the discussion in the early chapters applies to organizations.

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

Article Discussion

[Go to discussion page]