More Fun than A Barrel of Monkeys

The sections on Risk Management and on Metrics are particularly good. But they are quite exhaustive, some might say heavy-handed, so you need to skim over to section 5 which starts to talk about tailoring the SE processes to the needs of the project and the effort available. I hesitate to suggest that the Handbook be made bigger, but it could do with more detail here! There’s even a description of what’s in it on the website (perversely, in a different area) from which I quote: “The INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook provides a description of the key process activities performed by systems engineers.

It describes in some detail the purpose for each process activity, what needs to be done, and how it can be done. The intended audience is primarily the new systems engineer, an engineer in another discipline who needs to perform some systems engineering functions, or a more-experienced systems engineer who needs a convenient reference. The intent is to provide enough information for the user to determine whether a given process activity is appropriate in supporting the business objective(s) on the program or project they support, and how to go about implementing the process activity.