FINAL THOUGHTS FROM SYENNA FINAL THOUGHTS FROM SYENNA Dear Reader, It is now the anniversary of my first article for your prestigious publication, and if you are reading this the editors have seen fit to accept another contribution. I am fortunate to be in touch with April, who is one of the authoring team for the 5 th Edition of the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook (H5). She has generously given me some insight into what we might expect to see when it is published – see the following table. I use the abbreviation “H5” because every time I type “SEH” into a Microsoft application, Bill Gates turns it into “SHE”. I take this as subliminal support for my theory that women are naturally great systems engineers, whilst men have to work at it. Change No 1
2
2
April 2022
Description of change After the necessary context setting, Value Engineering will be the first chapter in the book, followed by Decision Management Next will come Tailoring
The processes will appear in alphabetical order
Rationale Engineering is all about decision-making. Every decision should be made with respect to an agreed Value model. Having this at the forefront of our thinking doesn’t guarantee good decisions, but at least we can make a respectable attempt. This topic is the last thing to be covered in H4, when eyelids are giving up the battle against gravity. The last shall now be first. Systems Engineers have to be business-savvy, and it’s not a bad idea to get over this shock at the start of the book. People get depressed reading H4, thinking that they will never be able to follow all those processes with full rigor. After a couple of weeks or so they get to tailoring. Then they discover that they only need execute the processes to the extent justified by the relevant business case. The usual reaction is “if only they had told me that in the first place”. It’s best not to tell them that tailoring could result in them increasing the rigor. In H4 people are desperate to read time into what is a set of logical process descriptions (what and how but not when). They get trapped into thinking that the sequence of execution has to be the sequence of printing, which is only the case for a sequential life cycle approach. In alphabetical order, Disposal (for example) will come before System requirements definition, which isn’t a bad idea since most requirements are rubbish.
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PPI SyEN
