Engineering Project Management

2Performing Engineering on Projects (Part I)

How do we do engineering on projects? Engineering projects are different from other projects, so learning to be an effective manager of an engineering project starts by understanding how we do engineering on projects. We accomplish this engineering through the engineering life‐cycle. In this chapter, I summarize key aspects of how we do the initial stages of the engineering life‐cycle, which are called “requirements analysis” and “design.” We will complete our overview of how we do engineering on projects in Chapter 3.

2.1 The Systems Method

2.1.1 Motivation and Description

In Chapter 1, we introduced the idea of a project life‐cycle – a series of steps or stages through which a project progresses toward completion.

Each stage can and should be governed by a set of guidelines – which we termed processes – whose level of rigor and detail should be adapted to the needs of each particular project.

A discipline called systems engineering, which is in many ways closely related to engineering project management, has developed what we might call the system method. This is intended to increase the likelihood that a system development effort will be successful, and achieves this increased likelihood of success by placing the focus on the behavior of the system as a whole, rather than exclusively on the parts and components.

Since the objectives are so similar, we can transfer much of this thought process from systems engineering to ...