My workshop for the Project and Program Management Symposium in Canberra this August on the topic of integrating Systems Engineering and Project Management is now complete. The charts are available to the attendees and available here
Projects delivered in complex environments are often late, over-budget and provide fewer benefits than what originally expected. Systems Engineering is a paradigm found in the complex project environment that transforms the management paradigm from project-based to system-based.
In the traditional project management paradigm, success is defined as showing up on time, for the planned cost, with the documented requirements.
In the Systems Engineering paradigm, these success factors have two other criteria - benefits to the organization and benefits to the stakeholder of the resulting system.
A concept that integrates these two paradigms has been around for a long time [1]
In in our journey toward a comprehensive understanding of project success, one should not confuse any more between projects management success and project success. Semantically, project management success refers to efficiency, an internal concern to the project team, and project success embraces concerns of efficiency and effectiveness - in other words, all concerns, whether internal or external, short-term of long-term.
While there several project management methods for software intensive system of systems projects, rarely do these speak about the system engineering aspects of the project.
[1] "Toward a Typological Theory of Project Management," Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir, Research Policy, 25(4), pp. 607-632, 1996
