ABSTRACT
As mentioned many times in previous chapters, systems engineering is a well-defined, requirement-driven process that brings systems to life. With increasing levels of complexity, the system design life cycle could last for years, even decades, with hundreds or even thousands of people involved globally. There are many ways in which things could go wrong, as unexpected events occur almost all the time. Dealing with these uncertainties in a dynamic environment puts good planning and management efforts in demand. The systems engineering management plan (SEMP) is such a document that has been developed and widely adopted in complex systems design, to plan, schedule, and control system engineering design efforts and activities throughout the system life cycle, mainly focusing on the technical aspects. In this chapter, we will use SEMP as the basis and template to illustrate how system engineering design is planned and controlled; more specifically, we will
1. Describe the system design teams and responsibilities 2. Describe SEMP and its content, including major sections and infor-
mation included in each of the sections 3. Describe system control concepts; introduce two commonly used
project control models, the critical path method (CPM) and the program evaluation and review technique (PERT), providing examples of both models
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the fundamental concepts of systems management and models that can be used to schedule and control the progress of systems engineering technical activities.
