Guidance for General Managers
General managers include managers of system development projects, system acquisitions, product lines, systems of systems, and commercial and government organizations. The SEBoK can help them understand the boundaries and synergies among systems engineering (SE), systems development, project management, and life cycle support, and how these are likely to evolve with increasing use of evolutionary development, lean and agile methods, and increasing use of systems to provide purchased services vs. salable products. The SEBoK can also help them understand how to best balance their mix of hardware, software, human factors, domain, and specialty-area SEs, and how to evolve toward more cross-discipline SEs.
The Use of Topics
General Managers will find the following knowledge areas of the SEBoK to be relevant to their interests and needs:
Part 1 of the SEBoK provides General Managers with an understanding of the relations among SE, system development, and project management; of overall trends in the nature of systems interdependency, complexity, assurance levels, and pace of change; and of the evolving nature of integrated hardware-software- human systems. It also provides pointers to other parts of the SEBoK of interest to General Managers
Part 3 of the SEBoK provides General Managers with an understanding of evolving system life cycle models and their elements. It indicates which of these elements are SE-intensive, and provides overall guidance on the management of the SE activity.
Part 4 provides General Managers with an understanding of how the SE function varies by class of system (product, service, enterprise, and systems of systems) engineering). Part 5 provides them with specifics on SE governance and competence development. Part 6 provides them with specifics on how SE relates to software engineering, project management, industrial engineering, procurement and acquisition, and specialty engineering for such specialties as safety, security, maintainability, and usability. Part 7 provides them with relevant case studies and vignettes illustrating how the parts have been used in similar situations in successes to emulate and failures to avoid. Two General Manager vignettes are provided below as example use cases.
Vignette: Emerging Nation Satellite System
Tom Lee is the General Manager for Telecommunications of a large emerging nation whose leadership has given him the responsibility of creating a national satellite system for telecommunications and earth resources observation. His first need is to perform some SE functions to analyze alternative solutions and to perform cost-benefit tradeoff analyses. For this initial activity, he would like to use a combination of a proven satellite SE company and some of his brightest aerospace SEs, who can learn from the proven company and form the nucleus of the ultimate national satellite system in development and operation.
To ensure that he has a good understanding of the required SE capabilities and their application to the satellite system domain, he uses Part 1 of the SEBoK for an overview and pointers to the key sections of Parts 3 through 6 as discussed above. After getting a good general understanding of the life cycle, nature, scope, and management aspects of enterprise SE from these parts, he closely studies the successful satellite system case studies in Part 7 (Global Positioning System, MITI) for good ways to proceed and the unsuccessful satellite system case study in Part 7 (Hubble Space Telescope) for pitfalls to avoid. Thus prepared, he feels confident in going forward in formulating and executing his approach.
Vignette: Commercial Safety Equipment Company
Maria Moreno is the General Manager of Safety First Equipment Company, a highly successful company which has specialized in hardware-intensive safety equipment, but is finding that its competitors are eroding their market share with software-intensive capabilities and user amenities. Maria’s background is in electromechanical systems, and she is preparing an initiative to make Safety First into a leading software-intensive safety equipment provider. Besides the general SEBoK information in Parts 1 through 6, she focuses on the Part 6 knowledge area of Systems Engineering and Software Engineering. This provides her with numerous insights about the nature of software, differences between hardware and software architectures and practices, and key aspects about managing software teams. She also consults the article on Human Systems Integration in the Systems Engineering and Specialty Engineering knowledge area in Part 6 for insights into the SE of user amenities.
She then looks into the case studies in Part 7 and finds two safety-critical SE case studies to learn from. The Next Generation Medical Infusion Pump Case Study provides here with insights on the software aspects of safety practices such as software fault tree analysis and failure modes and effects analysis, and also on overall approaches for concurrent engineering of the hardware, software, and human factors aspects of safety-critical equipment. The Medical Radiation Case Study provides her with examples of hardware-software pitfalls to avoid in safety-critical equipment. She now has the basis for assembling a core team of Safety First SEs, complemented by external experts in software and human factors engineering. As a first assignment, she begins to develop a team shared vision by having them read the portions of the SEBoK that she has found most valuable in assessing the challenges of transitioning Safety First into a leading software-intensive, user-friendly safety equipment provider.
Summary
The SEBoK provides insights and guidance concerning systems engineering principles and practices for General Managers in a variety of application domains and SE-related management challenge areas. These complement the general management guidance available in sources such as the PMBOK.
References
Works Cited
PMI. 2008. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). 4th ed. Newtown Square, PA, USA: Project Management Institute (PMI).
Primary References
PMI. 2008. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). 4th ed. Newtown Square, PA, USA: Project Management Institute (PMI).
Additional References
Abran, A., J. W. Moore, P. Bourque, R. Dupuis, and L. L. Tripp. 2004. SWEBOK: Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, 2004 version. Los Alamitos, CA, USA and Tokyo, Japan: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Booher, H. 2003. Handbook of Human-Systems Integration. New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Pew, R. and A. Mavor. 2007. Human-System Integration in the System Development Process. Washington, DC, USA: The National Academies Press.
Comments from SEBok 0.5 Wiki
No comments were logged for this article in the SEBoK 0.5 wiki. Because of this, it is especially important for reviewers to provide feedback on this article. Please see the discussion prompts below.
SEBoK Discussion
Please provide your comments and feedback on the SEBoK below. You will need to log in to DISQUS using an existing account (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or create a DISQUS account. Simply type your comment in the text field below and DISQUS will guide you through the login or registration steps. Feedback will be archived and used for future updates to the SEBoK. If you provided a comment that is no longer listed, that comment has been adjudicated. You can view adjudication for comments submitted prior to SEBoK v. 1.0 at SEBoK Review and Adjudication. Later comments are addressed and changes are summarized in the Letter from the Editor and Acknowledgements and Release History.
If you would like to provide edits on this article, recommend new content, or make comments on the SEBoK as a whole, please see the SEBoK Sandbox.
blog comments powered by Disqus