I suspect that most real world systems engineering is done on a rather ad-hoc basis. Possibly because most people involved in the product development process don’t really appreciate what elements are required to do systems engineering.

Jim Brown, of Tech-Clarity, has just published a nice “spotlight” paper, outlining ten points for streamlining product development with systems engineering. It’s neither long, nor detailed, but it gives a picture of the important elements, in a way that even a non-technical manager could appreciate.

Here’s a quick summary, taken from Jim’s website:

Tech-Clarity research shows that manufacturers have grown the amount of software in their products, the importance of product software, and the level of innovation driven by software over the last five years. Products that combine mechanical, electrical, and software are compelling, but add tremendous product development complexity leading to quality issues, poor productivity, and delayed time to market. Tech-Clarity offers the following ten tips to help companies overcome these challenges by streamlining product development using systems engineering best practices:

• Start with Requirements

• Take Time for Conceptual Design

• Optimize the Architecture

• Reuse at all Levels of Design

• Simulate the System

• Manage Change

• True Transparency

• Track and Trace it All

• Validate and Verify with the V

• Manage Configurations Continuously

One thing I find amusing about the paper is that it implicitly assumes that software is a big part of the systems engineering process.  This is probably an artifact of who paid Jim to do the paper: IBM’s Rational group, which does tools for managing software.  But the themes he discusses are applicable to any systems engineering process.

While I’d like a whole lot more detail than the paper presents (for example, best practices about how to manage requirements), I think this is a good start to a conversation about what it takes to do systems engineering right.