8.4.3 Systems Engineering MegaPractices – Identification, Assessment and Redundancy By Object Analysis and Modeling

What happens when practices and disciplines overlap? – Wasted efforts, turf battles, redefinition of lifecycle models based on different management, engineering, manufacturing, finance, maintenance and support viewpoints. In short, a proliferation of the ‘way we do things around here’. Systems engineering has become a set of complex processes that are difficult to implement and improve. Too often, either sub processes are developed for lower tier Integrated Product Team performance or for large enterprise level practices which are promoted as ‘Best Practices’ (Heibler 1998). Most often, the linkage at different levels of abstraction is very difficult to see, much less apply. These are difficult to implement for management of larger and smaller projects. Also many projects in an enterprise are at different stages of development, which makes process improvement across the organization difficult to assess and implement. Lifecycle ‘Practices’ and ‘Standards’ are generated as panaceas for good systems engineering and are evidenced as: Systems integration, Systems design, Systems validation, Software engineering, Design to Cost (DTC), Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA), Cost as an independent variable (CAIV), Affordability, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Supply Chain Management, Robust Design, Risk management, Requirements management, Time‐to‐market, and Just‐in‐Time Manufacturing The purpose of this paper is to show how a set of capability improvement models (SW‐CMM 1995, SECM‐EIA731 1998, CMMI 2000, ISO 9001 1994, ISO 15504 1998) and process definition standards (IEEE1220 1998, EIA‐632 1998, ISO 15288 2000, and ISO12207 1995) can be used to test these megapractices for commonality and redundancy. Object oriented (OO) techniques are be used to: 1) identify the validity of megaprocesses, 2) determine which processes belong to megapractices and are common throughout the chosen set, and 3) assist assessors and process improvement practitioners in selection and optimization of best set of practices for the top level enterprise down to team level performance. Conclusions from this analysis are: Systems Integration includes Design Reviews, Integrated Schedules, and Integrated Planning CAIV includes Trade Studies, Requirements, Risk, Cost, Performance (TPMs), and Decision Making Software Development is a large subset of Systems Integration in software‐intensive systems