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 deliver to 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.

Like all thoughtful strategies, SE strategy is properly driven by the goals of the organization and the resources and constraints available to achieve those goals. SE strategy in particular is influenced by several considerations, especially:

The purpose of the organization
What value the organization offers its stakeholders; e.g., profits, public safety, entertainment, convenience, etc.
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 SE activities are being performed; for example development, deployment, operations, or maintenance of a product or service.
The scale of the organization and the systems and services of interest; is it a single site company or a global venture? Is it a project responsible for a relatively modest product for internal use by a BE, such as a new Web application to track employee training, or is a program creating a new hybrid automobile complete with concerns for engineering, manufacturing, servicing, and distribution?
The culture of the organization in which the SE activities are performed; e.g., is the organization risk-averse? Do people normally collaborate or work in stove-pipes?
The organizational structure and how well the current structure aligns with what is needed to create new products and services.

Based on those general considerations, the SE strategy addresses:

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

Topics

SE organizational strategy knowledge is divided into three topics:

References

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Primary References

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