RE: [SAGE] INCOSE

["John LLOYD" <jal@mdacorporation.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Hilton [mailto:hilton@entelos.com]
> Sent: January 30, 2006 9:41 AM
> To: John LLOYD; sage-members@sage.org
> Subject: RE: [SAGE] INCOSE
> 
> 
> John,
> 
> Thank you for your comments.
> 
> I remember having a vague thought along the lines "I don't think about
> this - I just do it."  Of course!  Rather than a pencil and 
> paper model,
> I conjure up a mental picture of what exists now and of what 
> is supposed
> to exist, worry out the details, plug in a fudge factor or 
> two, rig up a
> real-world 3-D "prototype" - then go for it.  If I understand you,
> "systems engineering" is the formalization of this process; of what I
> (we?) do as a matter of course in our lives as systems administrators.
> Are we on the same page?
> 
> Hilton
> 
> 

Yes we are on the same page.

If you can do this, and it works, and you get the end result documented (in other words the scale of the problem fits within your informal methods), then you are already doing a form of "tailored systems engineering" and you don't need to fix it.

Some situations differ.  In my own situation, I don't "own" the infrastructure, instead we are selling a heavily configured and variable-scale system to different customers, so a formal process is mandatory to keep the situation in control.  And keep track of the different customers' different requirements.

My own background is electrical engineering, and I didn't understand the basis of "system engineering" until some of the situations we ran into basically came up and figuratively slapped us in the face.  Once we got into it, it was an obvious benefit.  (Having the rest of the company be doing SE for most of their customers helped a lot too.  We sell "governnment systems" and the SE approach is typical in the government markets, and no I'm not talking accounting systems.)

One of these years I'll put up a wiki or web page with some of these ideas of mapping system admin to system engineering on it.

John