4.2.1 Process Tailoring in Iterative Development

The organisational context in which systems engineering is practised is changing. Organisations are becoming increasingly concerned with the flexibility of their processes. Fundamental issues of responsiveness to innovation in product concept, system architecture, component technologies and inter-working relationships are of growing importance. Current developments in management thinking and in e-business technologies are also pushing in the direction of flexibility and adaptability. This paper addresses the tailoring of systems engineering processes to iterative product development, using a role/responsibility-based approach. Two levels of tailoring are discussed: (1) from standards and the systems engineering literature to an organisation's capability resources and (2) from the capability resources to an individual project. The approach is motivated by the wish to apply standard reference models developed by the systems engineering community in a flexible way, especially to link and scale up innovative and entrepreneurial activity into projects. Simple examples are provided to illustrate the approach and some issues involved in a practical application are discussed.