[wip] Essential Reads: Systems and Requirements Engineering

Planning systems to become successful needs more attention. Let's learn from the best.

When setting out to create something new may it be:

a new venture
a new project
a new product

…we tend to ask ourselves: How can we plan better than last time?

Defining the tactics for such an endeavour obviously depends on on many factors. Since you have read the word depends and probably rolled your eyes, we will jump ahead and assume some conditions

we are a small or medium or no organisation at all
we feel inspired by successful organisations, but will not blindly follow what they
we will read what very large or very large organisations are doing and trim it to our needs

Why Looking Towards Others?

We could also just invent something - and indeed this is something we need to do to get ahead eventually.

However, other organisations have gone through very many maturity stages, by failing (and succeeding) forward. Those large organisation are following principles already, that we are striving to achieve, because we want to emulate their success. Dismissing their oftentimes public record of historic learning, would be unwise or just very uneconomic.

Also, big organisations define the playing field, with things such as compliance, because they are relevant enough to be attacked. Rules are not only there to be followed, as they represent in the worst cases a kind of physical barrier, they can though also be used as guidance for us, what to do.

If need be, we could of course take guidelines of such organisations and blindly emulate them, carrying or own innovation forward all the while, or just start innovating, once we have reached their level of maturity.

What to Read?

In recent years US government organisations (no affiliation or opinion about them) have shown to produce a lot of documents and statements that are actually very useful. And they need to be public to a degree.

Compare your own googling of mediocre blog posts - it’s not you, it’s the internet - to this treasure trove of what I dub the DoD CTO (not a person but DoD Research & Engineering, OUSD(R&E) -> Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering ). Super cool.

They run the…

DoD Systems Engineering Guidebook

Available under this link and their library you will find a guide for free, that is complete, with no bells and whistles that you won’t need. Well, ignore the military bits if you want.

Let alone looking at their table of contents should give of list of things we need cover. Things that catch my eye: