Integrating Program Management and Systems Engineering

Methods, Tools, and Organizational Systems for Improving Performance

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119259152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de proyectos

Integrate critical roles to improve overall performance in complex engineering projects

Integrating Program Management and Systems Engineering shows how organizations can become more effective, more efficient, and more responsive, and enjoy better performance outcomes. The discussion begins with an overview of key concepts, and details the challenges faced by System Engineering and Program Management practitioners every day. The practical framework that follows describes how the roles can be integrated successfully to streamline project workflow, with a catalog of tools for assessing and deploying best practices. Case studies detail how real-world companies have successfully implemented the framework to improve cost, schedule, and technical performance, and coverage of risk management throughout helps you ensure the success of your organization's own integration strategy. Available course outlines and PowerPoint slides bring this book directly into the academic or corporate classroom, and the discussion's practical emphasis provides a direct path to implementation.

The integration of management and technical work paves the way for smoother projects and more positive outcomes. This book describes the integrated goal, and provides a clear framework for successful transition.

• Overcome challenges and improve cost, schedule, and technical performance
• Assess current capabilities and build to the level your organization needs
• Manage risk throughout all stages of integration and performance improvement
• Deploy best practices for teams and systems using the most effective tools

Complex engineering systems are prone to budget slips, scheduling errors, and a variety of challenges that affect the final outcome. These challenges are a sign of failure on the part of both management and technical, but can be overcome by integrating the roles into a cohesive unit focused on delivering a high-value product. Integrating Program Management with Systems Engineering provides a practical route to better performance for your organization as a whole.

Part I
IN SEARCH OF INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS

Part I explores the importance of complex programs for society and the positive impact they can have when they perform well, as well as the downsides when they do not. Some of the challenges and causes of poor program performance, as well as factors that contribute to program success, are examined. There are a number of common elements that begin to explain the range in program performance, including the functions performed by the program management and systems engineering disciplines and their approach to working together. The section concludes by identifying a way to mitigate or avoid many common program challenges—the concept of integration.

Chapter 1 uses the example of SpaceX Corporation to illuminate the difference in performance that can result from a unique approach to managing engineering programs. It explores how performance outcomes may result from a combination of factors, but ultimately are rooted in the capabilities that organizations build to be both innovative and efficient. Key players in creating the conditions for success or failure in these programs are the program management and systems engineering functions.

Chapter 2 illustrates the different challenges that programs face, often rooted in the complexity of tasks and how that complexity is navigated. Poor handling of these challenges results in poor program performance, as illustrated in three case examples. These challenges are well‐known, yet many programs still suffer the negative consequences of not identifying and dealing with them appropriately. The chapter argues that an integrated management framework that brings together program management and systems engineering may produce better outcomes for these complex programs.

Chapter 3 examines effective or high‐functioning programs to better understand the factors that contribute to their success. Higher levels of program performance are achieved through what is referred to as “integration”—increasing the ability of all program participants to collaborate, communicate, and bring their respective contributions to bear in addressing challenges. Better collaboration and integration between systems engineering and program management functions can overcome program challenges and improve overall performance.

Chapter 4 explores the fields of program management and systems engineering to understand their history and evolution, the roles played by their respective practitioners, and their orientations toward work tasks. Large, complex programs rely on high performance on the technical side and exceptional management overall. Both program management and systems engineering disciplines contribute critical benefits to the program, but can often work at cross purposes. Both possess unique and specialized sets of knowledge capable of creating significant benefits independently, but, more importantly, even greater benefits when working together. However, they are also susceptible to being trapped within their own local mindsets to the detriment of overall program performance.

Chapter 5 explores integration between program management and systems engineering to identify its role in program success. Properly defining and understanding integration across the organization is paramount to improving performance in large programs. Integration may manifest itself in a number of different ways depending on the setting. This chapter conveys an expansive definition of integration in operational terms and how it is manifest in specific organizations across many sectors.

1
TOWARD A NEW MINDSET

1.1 Striving for Perfection in Complex Work

A once relatively common expression in the United States was “if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we <insert complaint>?” It conveyed a sense that the country, its technical experts, its government, and its people were capable of amazing things if they put their minds to it. There was another term that went along with it—“rocket scientists.” Those were the clever people who made those miraculous things happen so that they seemed commonplace. Given enough rocket scientists, one imagined, just about any problem, no matter how complex, could be solved. Perhaps those expressions are locked in a certain time and place—the late 1960s and early 1970s—when the United States was routinely putting men on the moon, less than seven decades after people first took to the sky in the dawn of powered flight.

The same expression simultaneously conveyed a sense of frustration that things don't always work as hoped or planned, no matter how clever or skilled we might appear or how much thought we put into the plans. Why is it that despite having advanced knowledge, tools, and capabilities, and even having demonstrated that it is possible to do something amazing, best efforts sometimes end in disappointment or failure? Many other human activities that don't involve the complexities of spaceflight but are in their own way complex (think energy, infrastructure, transportation, public health) nevertheless invoke the same question. This book tries to answer that question in the context of complex programs.

The effort to send men to the moon and bring them back safely was a huge program that was itself embedded in the U.S. national space program, and was linked with other programs that served U.S. national strategies and priorities during the Cold War. The Apollo program comprised many individual, highly complicated engineering projects, but also other program activities that touched research, education, defense, and ultimately commercial products. The management challenges were significant, and so, of course, were the engineering challenges. To address these technical challenges, a new discipline called systems engineering rose to prominence. The marriage of systems engineering with program management approaches proved to be critical to the Apollo program's success.

As successful as it was, though, it was not sustained or repeated in quite the same way. The last human to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan, stepped into his spacecraft and left the surface of the moon on December 14, 1972. Humans have not returned since, nor left low earth orbit (LEO) for that matter. Of the 12 people who ever walked on the moon, only seven survive today. The passage of so much time has left those remaining elderly.

However often it might appear that the capability to accomplish important and inspiring things is diminishing, counterexamples seem to appear. It has been over four decades since people last set foot on the moon after the United States mobilized a national‐level effort to accomplish that task. But a small U.S. company is defiantly working not only to recapture those capabilities, but to significantly exceed them. The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, during its relatively short existence has not only accomplished many important and inspiring things, but has done so in a way that significantly outperforms all competitors, both government and private, and seems poised to create a renaissance in the space sector.

1.2 Boldly Going Again Where People Have Gone Before

The founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is a successful entrepreneur with a tendency to disrupt business‐as‐usual in a surprising array of business sectors, including finance (PayPal), energy (Solar City), transportation (Tesla Motors), and of course space transportation (SpaceX). His long‐term vision and the impetus for starting SpaceX was to make humans a multiplanet species by enabling them to settle on Mars, and more quickly than the perpetually slipping timetables of government space agency plans. Based on what SpaceX has accomplished so far, that vision seems achievable (Vance, 2015). Perhaps as compelling as the impressive launch hardware and support systems that SpaceX has created is the way that it has been able to assemble teams of, yes, rocket scientists, and to design a work system that enables them to be incredibly productive and produce complex systems quickly. The following case study describes how SpaceX has been able to accomplish this.¹

Since its inception in 2002, SpaceX has accomplished more in a short period of time than any of its competitors. SpaceX has logged over 30 successful flights and has achieved certification for NASA and United States Air Force launches. SpaceX has developed about 100 major flight‐proven products in 14 years. These include the development of five engines (Merlin, Merlin Vacuum, Kestrel, Draco Thruster, Raptor), three launch vehicles (Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and the full‐thrust Falcon 9) and Dragon and Dragon 2 spacecraft, an autonomous spaceport drone ship to enable landing reusable rockets, along with associated modern ground test, launch, and mission facilities. At the time of this writing SpaceX is completing development of the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V moon rockets, the Falcon 9 Heavy. It continues to fine‐tune the propulsive landing reusable first stage of...