DAO Systems Engineering Study Final Report

The overall objective of the study was to determine the appropriate organisational and other requirements for the successful application of systems engineering in the acquisition of major capital equipment by the Australian Department of Defence. Specific objectives were to determine the role, responsibilities, organisational structure and resources for the DAO Systems Engineering Policy and Support Centre (PSC), and to review the current DAO practice of systems engineering and report on the policy, procedural, guidance, training and tool requirements to support the successful application of systems engineering in the DAO.

What is Systems Engineering?

Systems engineering is a common sense approach to the realisation of successful systems. The approach is based on the lessons learned from success and failure in numerous diverse projects, particularly in the defence and aerospace sectors. The strength of systems engineering comes from this background, in minimising the risk arising from errors that have been shown to occur repeatedly in projects which use intuitive, ad hoc, de facto or simplistic approaches. While less systematic approaches may work to some extent with relatively small and straightforward projects, they regularly fail as the endeavours become larger and more complex.

Systems engineering is an overarching and integrating discipline, which overlaps, interacts with and coordinates the inputs of other related disciplines such as Integrated Logistic Support (ILS), test and evaluation, configuration management and software engineering. It also has strong links with project management, particularly with regard to the technical aspects of a project.
Systems engineering places a strong emphasis on risk management, and also on the activities which if not performed, or if performed poorly, lead to the greatest risks in projects.