Development and Evaluation of Systems Engineering Strategies: An Assessment-Based Approach

Linking process improvement with the business and strategic goals of an organization is a key prerequisite for enabling such process improvement initiatives to generate appropriate value for the organization. However, process improvement methods themselves typically do not deal in detail with the provision of guidance for the derivation of business focused process improvements. Therefore, we provide a best practice-based approach for developing and evaluating systems engineering strategies, based on a conceptual framework for defining and representing such engineering strategies. The resulting engineering strategies are aligned with corporate strategies and business goals. Strategy objects as a core element of our approach can be associated with the process areas and processes of existing process improvement frameworks. The presented approach thus allows that any process improvement action can consequently be systematically aligned with the strategy objects of the developed systems engineering strategies and thus with the business and strategic goals of the enterprise.