Improving systems engineering effectiveness in rapid response development environments

Systems engineering is often ineffective in development environments where large, complex, brownfield systems of systems are evolved through parallel development of new capabilities in response to external, time-sensitive requirements. This paper defines a conceptual framework to improve that effectiveness and better integrate the systems engineering and software engineering processes. The framework is based on a services approach to systems engineering and the use of kanban techniques to schedule scarce enterprise systems engineering resources across multiple related systems and software development projects. The framework also addresses the differing value of work items to multiple stakeholders in the scheduling and coordination processes. Models and simulations are being used to capture, refine and validate the framework prior to in vivo experimentation.