Specifications of a method and tool to support the management of systems engineering projects

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools are widely used by the industry. However, they are not sufficient to guarantee the success of projects and too many projects still fail. Industrial groups have argued that these failures may be related to the managerial techniques used. Indeed organizational processes are more or less specifically mentioned in Systems Engineering (SE) standards but in practice project managers tend to rely more on their own standards which sometime set forth practices not in line with those of the SE domain, hence the reported discrepancies which very often lead to project failure. Thus to improve the companies´ competitiveness when developing new products, cooperation between processes related to system development and Project Management (PM) is key to getting performance and success. This paper presents arguments which tend to support this theory and introduces an ongoing project of method and tool that aim at integrating both domains.