Lean for Systems Engineering with Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering

Bohdan W. Oppenheim

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118008898
• eBook ISBN: 9781118063989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

"Bohdan W. Oppenheim has pulled together experience-based insights of experts across industry, government, and academia into a comprehensive sourcebook for lean systems engineering principles and practices. This book can educate those new to lean engineering, as well as provide new insights and enablers that best-in-class organizations will want to adopt." —Dr. Donna H. Rhodes, Principal Research Scientist, SEAri and LAI, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Lean for Systems Engineering is targeted at the practitioner who is trying to make systems engineering more effective in her or his organization or program, yet its scholarly underpinnings make the text very suitable for teachers. Educators and trainers who wish to weave lean thinking into their systems engineering curriculum will find this an invaluable text." —Earll M. Murman, Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"At last, a book that distills years of research and scholarly inquiry into a concise and coherent form for both the student and practitioner. This book will become the favored guide and 'must read' for any engineer and manager trying to establish and maintain lean practices and principles in their systems engineering/product development processes. —J. Robert Wirthlin, PhD, Lt. Col., USAF, Program Director of the Graduate Research and Development Management Program, Air Force Institute of Technology Visiting Faculty, U.S. Air Force Center for Systems Engineering

"A vital contribution to linking lean practices to systems engineering. I will definitely use it as a reference for my course and writings on a value approach to product and system development." —Dr. Stanley I. Weiss, Consulting Professor, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University

"Taking the opportunity to develop and refine the Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering provided clear direction for Lean Engineering Accelerated Planning at Rockwell Collins. The Lean Enablers form a solid basis for Lean Product Development. Following this checklist and methodology promotes Lean value and waste elimination—and commonsense best practices." —Deborah A. Secor, Principal Project Manager and Lean Master, Rockwell Collins

"Bo Oppenheim has been at the forefront of lean systems engineering for the better part of the last decade...An ardent advocate of lean systems engineering, the author has offered an honest appraisal of where lean systems engineering stands today. Practitioners interested in lean systems engineering will find the Lean Enablers especially useful."— Azad M. Madni, PhD, Professor and Director, SAE Program, Viterbi School of Engineering; Professor, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Introducing Lean Systems Engineering and Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering

This book was written for two purposes: to popularize the emerging field termed Lean Systems Engineering (LSE), and to serve as a textbook and reference for the first major product created under it: Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering (LEfSE).

The discipline of Systems Engineering (SE) was created to help with the development of complex systems that must work unconditionally. It was first shaped in the ballistic missile program by Si Ramo1 and Dean Wooldridge in 1954, with the first formal contract to perform systems engineering and technical assistance (SETA). Under this contract, Ramo and Wooldridge developed some of the first principles for SE and applied them to the ballistic missile program—considered one of the most successful major technology development efforts ever undertaken by the U.S. government [Jacobsen, 2001]. SE is the practical engineering realization based on systems thinking, a comprehensive design process of a system that satisfies all customer needs during an entire system life cycle. The process demonstrates reliable execution of system development programs and leads to extraordinary technological successes in space, air, naval, and ground systems and weapons. The International Council on System Engineering (INCOSE), the professional society of Systems Engineers, offers the following definition of Systems Engineering:

Systems Engineering

(SE) is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, and then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: operations, cost and schedule, performance, training and support, test, manufacturing, and disposal. SE considers both the business and the technical needs of all customers with the goal of providing a quality product that meets the user needs. INCOSE

Balance between technical and business success is one of the critical aspects of high-quality SE. Regretfully, during the past decade, in some government programs inadequate incentives tended to throw the balance off. Namely, system or mission assurance was incentivized while short program schedule and low cost were not. In consequence, in many recent programs the schedule and budget were exceeded, and the final schedules and budgets were significantly extended beyond comparable programs of earlier periods. In extreme cases, instead of engineering complex systems, the SE process has deteriorated to a complex bureaucracy of program artifacts with no technical success in sight. This book describes how Lean Thinking is applied as a “rescue” to SE, to achieve both technical and business successes.

Lean Thinking (or, briefly, Lean) is a holistic paradigm that originated at Toyota2 and focused on delivering value to the customer while removing waste from all activities.

Lean dramatically reduced car development and production times and costs while increasing product quality and stakeholder satisfaction, and became a standard practice in most manufacturing industries. Inspired by these successes, Lean was applied in many other domains, including supply chain management, product development, administration, accounting, healthcare, and government, in each case creating significant well documented benefits.

Lean Thinking (Lean):

“Lean Thinking is the dynamic, knowledge-driven, and customer-focused process through which all people in a defined enterprise continuously eliminate waste with the goal of creating value.” LAI EdNet

Lean Systems Engineering (LSE) is an emerging field representing the synergy of SE and Lean.

Lean Systems Engineering (LSE):

The application of lean wisdom, principles, practices and tools to systems engineering in order to enhance the delivery of value to system's stakeholders. LSE Working Group

The Lean in Lean SE should be regarded as the process of amending the well-established, traditional SE process with the wisdom of Lean Thinking, rather than replacing SE with a new body of knowledge. Put emphatically:

Lean Systems Engineering:

does not mean “less systems engineering,” but rather more and better SE, with better preparations of the enterprise processes, people and tools; better program planning and frontloading; better workflow management; and better program management and leadership with higher levels of responsibility, authority, and accountability. The benefits of LSE are immediately visible in better SE processes, as well as in the streamlined execution of the program. There is less waste, waiting, and rework; more predictable and robust program flow; lower overall program cost and shorter schedule, and creation of better value to the customer.

The fundamental feature of LSE is to perform all preparations and planning of the people, processes, tools, and individual tasks well enough so that the tasks can be executed right the first time,3 creating customer value while minimizing waste. Under the LSE philosophy, system success or mission assurance is non-negotiable, and any task which is legitimately needed for success must be included in the program. It should be well-planned and executed with minimum waste.

Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering (LEfSE) is the first major practical product created under LSE, and is the main topic of this book. LEfSE is a checklist of 147 practices formulated as dos and don'ts of SE and some closely related aspects of Product Development (PD) and Enterprise Management (EM), including supply chain management. The intent of LEfSE is to offer comprehensive and actionable practices to the profession, with the objective of improving overall performance of SE and the PD program it serves; strengthen the value created by the program; increase the level of satisfaction of stakeholders; and reduce waste, program cost, and time. Most of the effort in developing LSE and the LEfSE was conducted by the LSE Working Group (LSE WG) of INCOSE. This was an intensive and rigorous two-year process by 14 experts, supported by members of the WG, and endorsed by surveys and by benchmarking with recent NASA and Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations for system development.

The surveys confirmed that practitioners regard LEfSE as both important, and not yet widely used. Benchmarking showed excellent convergence between LEfSE on one hand and NASA and GAO recommendations on the other, with LEfSE usually more detailed, comprehensive, and actionable than the GAO recommendations. The development of LEfSE is summarized in Chapter 6 of this book.

Version 1.0 of LEfSE was released to INCOSE and to the public in January 2009. In 2010 the LEfSE were recognized with two following prestigious awards:

• The INCOSE Product of the Year
• The Shingo Award for Research and Publication

These independent recognitions from both SE and Lean communities are regarded as an important step in validating LEfSE.

After the LEfSE were released to the public on the INCOSE web page,4 the author and several of his colleagues on the development team were invited to offer numerous (forty at the time of this writing) workshops, tutorials, webinars, and seminars to industry, governments, INCOSE meetings, and universities in the U.S., China, Finland, France, Italy, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Over 2000 participants took part in these professional events, generally excellently received. In many of these sessions, participants asked for more explicit information about the enablers than was possible to present in the short sessions. This book is a direct response to these requests.

As already mentioned, this book is intended as both an introductory textbook on LSE and a textbook and reference for Lean Enablers for SE. The material presented is broad in scope and it applies to the development of all types of complex systems in all domains, both in commercial and government programs. We hope that LEfSE will benefit Systems Engineers and other PD engineers and managers, professionals involved in systems acquisition both in industry and government, project managers, and faculty and students of these fields.

Even though the material presented in this book applies to all domains and all program types, government programs are mentioned most often for two reasons. First, SE is mandatory in such programs while it is not in commercial programs, thus the body of experience from government programs is significantly larger. Second, the amount of waste in governmental programs tends to be significantly higher than in commercial programs, which makes it a fertile ground for Lean thinkers.

The author chooses to explain selected enablers by comparing them to some current industrial and governmental practices that are less than perfect. The author hopes that the reader will accept this approach as constructive criticism leading to improvement of our programs, rather than “bashing” of the traditional practices. To repeat with emphasis: The traditional SE process is regarded as sound, capable of delivering successful complex systems, but not as good as it could be, and which we therefore propose to improve using Lean.

Both SE and Lean are a mix of art and science, and the art of effective teaming plays a critical role in SE. Some programs can be compared to the effort of climbing Mt. Everest or competitive racing in a storm—extraordinary teams pursuing difficult challenges against heavy odds. The Apollo, U2, F117, Boeing 747, nuclear submarine, and the Prius car programs come to mind as examples. Such programs inspire young people to choose a career in engineering. In sad contrast, creation of bureaucratic SE artifacts in isolated cubicles is not what inspiriting engineering was promised to be. The best programs must involve leadership, teamwork, enthusiasm, passion, inner energy, and joy in addition to hard competence and experience. The author tried to include these intangible elements in the book, in order to enthuse the reader about the potential of Lean, which is capable of drawing the best from us and motivating us to engineer extraordinary systems using extraordinarily efficient programs.

SE is a part (in fact, the most critical part for success) of the larger Product Development (PD) effort. SE has been called the nervous system of PD [Hitchens, 2007], planning, controlling, and monitoring in real time all functions of the PD “body.” However, many enterprises have structured SE to be a separate function (department) that supports all their PD programs. This led to a linguistic dichotomy, “SE and PD”. In this book the term “SE and PD” should be interpreted to mean “SE and other elements, parts, activities, etc. of PD.”

The traditional SE process is described in a number of manuals: INCOSE SE Handbook, the ISO 15288 standard, NASA and Department of Defense SE Manuals, Defense Acquisition University manuals, and numerous manuals created by individual defense and civilian companies. Arguably, the manuals describe essentially the same body of knowledge and the same traditional SE process with varying degrees of detail, emphasis, and user friendliness. Since the present project has been carried out under the auspices of INCOSE, and because the author regards the INCOSE SE Handbook v.3.2, 2010 as an excellent and user-friendly document, the present text makes references to that document only. Version 3.2 of the Handbook includes a short chapter on Lean Thinking. The first enabler of LEfSE explains that practitioners should continue using all processes described in the Handbook, adding Lean practices listed in LEfSE.

1.2 Organization of the Book

The book is organized as follows.

Chapter 2 takes the reader through a brief historical review of earlier industrial paradigms, setting Lean Thinking in the context of Total Quality Management (TQM), Concurrent Engineering (CE), and Six Sigma.

Chapter 3 presents Lean Thinking fundamentals, including the concepts of value, waste, and the process of creating value without waste, as captured into the six Principles of Lean Thinking. The Principles are called Value, Map the Value Stream, Flow, Pull, Perfection, and Respect for People. The fundamentals are included to make the book self-contained, but the reader unfamiliar with Lean will surely benefit from reading the transformational book Lean Thinking by J. Womack et al. [1996]. Readers who understand Lean manufacturing but have not been exposed to Lean Product Development (LPD) should read this chapter because it sets Lean fundamentals in the PD context.

The ability to recognize waste in Product Development is a critical skill in LSE. Waste should be regarded as a productivity reserve. Exposing waste aids in streamlining the program and creating time and cost bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Enablers and Subenablers in Chapter 7
• List of Figures and Numbered Text Boxes
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: A Brief History of Recent Management Paradigms
• Chapter 3: Lean Fundamentals
• Chapter 4: Lean in Product Development
• Chapter 5: From Traditional to Lean Systems Engineering
• Chapter 6: Development of Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering (LESE)
• Chapter 7: Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering
• Chapter 8: General Guidance for Implementation
• Glossary of Abbreviations
• References
• Appendix 1: INCOSE Web Page with LEfSE
• Appendix 2: Mapping of LEfSE onto INCOSE SE Processes
• Author's Biography
• Index
• Wiley Series