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How Many Systems Engineers Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?
Author(s) -
Nolan Andy,
Pickard Andrew C,
Nolan Judy,
Beasley Richard,
Pruitt Timothy C
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2018.00515.x
Subject(s) - judgement , computer science , brainstorming , schedule , work (physics) , work schedule , management science , psychology , artificial intelligence , engineering , political science , law , mechanical engineering , operating system
This paper transposes lessons learnt in cost and schedule estimating over to Systems Engineering. Systems Engineering, like estimating, is reliant on the experience and judgement of the individuals developing the system. But how effective is judgement and can we trust it? Often Systems Engineers will not have enough data and must rely on their judgement. But humans are notoriously bad at judgement because they suffer from emotions, biases and egos. However, since the early 20th century, it has been known that the collective judgement of a crowd can often be better than the judgement of many of the individuals within the crowd. Systems Engineering benefits from independent reviews, brainstorming and other group based techniques. We know that “many heads are better than one”, but how many heads? Although we all use judgement in most of our work and life, we have a low opinion of any conclusions based entirely on judgement. Based on a study of 3,760 guesses, this paper draws some useful conclusions for when to use judgement, when to use a crowd and how to determine the optimum crowd size when using judgement in Systems Engineering. Although the paper refers to the judgement of numerical values, the findings described in this paper apply to any group based activities in Systems Engineering.