Using Systems Practice to enable quality in design

A systems engineering research case study is presented of ongoing work that seeks to investigate and improve the use and embedding of Systems Practice among engineers while also improving understanding of Systems Practice and its methodologies. Following an action research spiral of plan, act, observe and reflect the engineers´ way of working is being progressively investigated. The perceptions and use of Systems Practice were first assessed through interviews and surveys. These were analyzed, main issues identified and a grounded theory developed which was modeled using system dynamics. These models were then used among key groups of engineers with the goal of identifying measures to assess Systems Practice. The engineers work in a field where a product´s lifecycle is normally measured in decades. The main challenge of the research so far has been to identify metrics which will assess the quality of the Systems Practice being used in the short, practical time-frames required for interventions to be made in projects at an early stage, forcing the metrics to be more qualitative, subjective and indirect. Perceptions of the quality of Systems Practice and completeness of problem understanding, and the speed at which problem understanding is gained, become key measures rather than the quality of the final solution.