Systems engineering emerged in an era of clean-sheet, top-down, stand-alone design where design began at the system level and proceeded through custom manufactured assemblies and electronics. In today’s age of rapid technology infusion cycles, changing needs, and middle-out or bottom-up design, we strive instead to embrace reuse of existing components …

In the past couple of weeks I have assisted several customers exploring and using the Resource class in the development and analysis of program plans. The basic question posed to me was this: How can I manage and set the use of resources without looking at each individual program activity’s …

The recent attention to the Zika virus and its potential global spread illustrates once again that the truly important questions occur at the systems level. Without systems thinking the questions can “hide” from decision makers emerging only later as damaging unintended consequences of decisions made without an adequate systems understanding. …

Influenced by the broad applicability of systems engineering and the fact that it is generally taught top-down, many systems engineers believe that they consistently engage in a variant of clean-sheet design. While systems engineering certainly enables fresh thinking and new looks into a problem space, the reality is that we …