Systems Engineering Organizational Strategy

Virtually every significant business or enterprise (BE) that creates products and services or that offers services benefits from performing a wide variety of SE activities to increase the value that those products and services offer to the BE owners, customers, employees, regulators, and other stakeholders. How the BE goes about organizing to conduct those SE activities is important to their effectiveness. For example, every BE has purpose, context and scope determined by some of its stakeholders and modified over time to increase the value the BE offers to them. Some BEs are for-profit, others work for the public good. Some BEs are a single site; others are far-flung "empires" with locations around the globe. Some work in highly regulated industries such as medical equipment; others work with little government oversight and can follow a much wider range of business practices. All of these variations in purpose, context, and scope shape the strategy for performing SE in the BE. This knowledge area explains the elements of SE organizational strategy and where information about such strategy can be found in the literature.

Topics

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

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

Overview

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.

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