In my blog post last month, Understanding Your System, I discussed the importance of the system context and system decomposition when defining the physical design of a system. This month I would like to additionally emphasize the role of functional analysis to define the functional design and explain how MBSE …

I have received many questions lately about managing multiple operational architectures in a single project. Frequently, this question is asked in the context of documenting the current as well as the future state of the architecture. In this article, I will discuss the steps in documenting an As-Is (or current) …

The systems engineering tool “Analysis of Alternatives,” or AoAs, impacts a broad range of concepts in systems engineering. In my experience, the inception of a project revolves around smart people—often program managers, technical directors, or business developers—discussing what they’ve heard or read or seen as an opportunity to do something …

Earlier this year, I did a webinar entitled “Getting Started on Enterprise Architectures.” In that webinar, I introduced the concept of operational architectures. The topic of operational architectures has come up in conversation lately and I thought this article would be a good time to explore the concept of operational …