ABSTRACT
Chapter 13 discusses five systems engineering tools. Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a tool used in the front-end of the System Development Process (SDP) to gain an understanding of the undesirable or problematic situation and determine the type of intervention needed to remove the undesirability in the situation. The chapter also contains a case study in which Checkland’s SSM was successfully applied. The Concept of Operations Document (CONOPS) is one of the fundamental project documents containing both a vision of the solution system in operation and the transition process that will upgrade the undesirable or problematic situation to turn it into a desirable situation sometime in the future. The chapter continues with a methodology for tackling complexity based on the systems approach to solving problems using a different approach to the current non-systems paradigm. The chapter includes a list of mathematical tools that are used in the front-end of systems engineering, and it concludes with the Zone of Ambiguity, an original tool that allows the analyst to obtain information in situations in which the sample size is too small to use conventional statistics.
