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Project Failures: The False Economy of Not Implementing Systems Engineering on Your Projects

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Project Failures: The False Economy of Not Implementing Systems Engineering on Your Projects

What is Systems Engineering (SE)?

The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines systems engineering as

"an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful  System Engineer. 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:

  • Operations
  • Cost & Schedule
  • Performance
  • Training & Support
  • Test
  • Disposal
  • Manufacturing

SE integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation. 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."

This is a very general definition; in future articles, I will more fully develop the systems engineering process and the different components of a successful SE effort.

Recently, CIO Magazine published an article that said that at least 50% of IT projects fail. The failures can minimally be categorized as follows:

  • Failure to deliver a product at all
  • Dramatic cost and schedule overruns
  • Inability to provide cost effective and technical maintenance and upgrades to a system
  • Poor acceptance by users
  • Major organizational disruptions (Google the story of Foxmeyer Drugs ERP disaster).

The author of the article attributed these project failures to poor or non-existent project management. 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. SE provides all of that, which feeds the project management plan, which governs the development, execution, and delivery of a system.

Unfortunately, SE is not inexpensive. 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? Or would you hire an architect to design the home-in essence, the systems engineer--with support form a civil engineer to design the support structure and foundation, an HVAC engineer to design the ductwork and scale the heating and air conditioning units appropriately, and so on? The architect and his or her team will add about-you guessed it-20% to your overall costs.

If it was your money on the line, would you roll the dice and not have an expert put together the engineering plan for your home and just let the tradesmen design the home while they were constructing it? Probably not. But the current trend is to do precisely that with complex software projects, as well as complex hardware systems such as cars (think Toyota's and GM's recent stories about systems failures), aircraft (think about Boeing and Airbus' design and delivery problems with the 787 and Airbus 380), and spacecraft (think Space Shuttle). In some of these cases, there was lip service paid to SE, or sound advice given and ignored by management, and all sorts of problems followed: cost overruns, failed systems, and for the end users in more than a few cases, death IT Engineer.

Conclusions

The lack of effective SE is almost a certain recipe for project failure: the increasing number of failed projects, defective systems, cost overruns, and lost business is increasing as businesses and government departments continue to cut back on this vital aspect of technology programs. Without the information and processes provided by the SE process, it will be almost impossible to successfully manage a project from concept through delivery, remain within budget, on schedule, and deliver what is expected by the customer.

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