It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem:OperationsCost & SchedulePerformanceTraining & SupportTestDisposalManufacturingSE integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation.
I would add to this the lack of effective SE as an even more fundament problem in today's development environment.
Without effective systems engineering, there can be no project management, because there is nothing to manage: projects are akin to building an airplane in flight, with no requirements, metrics, architecture, testing, modeling, feasibility studies, or modeling of alternatives.
Organizations need to budget approximately 20% of a project or program budget for effective SE.
Because of the expense, companies and government agencies are foregoing systems engineering as a necessary aspect of complex, high, visibility efforts, with expensive and often disastrous results.As a CIO/CTO, you need to ask yourself why so many projects are outright failures, or fail to deliver functionality as promised, or become so expensive that any cost benefits from new efficiencies the system provides are never realized, and why the people who have to use the system become frustrated and leave.
Often it's because SE is seen as an unnecessary extravagance, that the coders, database developers, and infrastructure team can handle themselves.Here's a question: If you were building your dream home, would you just let the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, HVAC technicians, and roofers design your home as they were building it?