Chapter 6
Development of Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering (LESE)
“Aim for the asymptote of SE excellence”
from the strategy of Lean Systems Engineering Working Group of INCOSE
6.1 Strategy
The team developing the enablers started with the following two positions:
- The established SE process is regarded as technically sound if used and funded properly, but is often burdened with waste, therefore it should benefit from Lean Thinking. In other words, the team decided to try improving a practice that has a lot of strengths, but is not as good as it could be.
- Waste in programs should be regarded as a productivity reserve to be unleashed using Lean Thinking.
During the development of LEfSE, the team (the names and affiliations are listed in Acknowledgments) set up the following strategy:
1. The enablers are intended for industrial and governmental practitioners.
2. Both SE and Lean represent challenging areas for research as they are grounded in industrial and government practice rather than in laboratories, theory, or mathematics. In addition, most large programs that use SE are proprietary, classified, with discontinuities in execution. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to gather explicit data and test hypotheses from such programs. SE case studies are not available in the public domain with sufficient detail to enable development of Lean practices. Where data is available, it is often of inadequate resolution or quality. Therefore, our team concluded that the development ...
