The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) have faced challenges in systems engineering in recent years (GAO, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018). The Helix project started in 2012 as a multi‐year longitudinal research study mainly to understand what makes systems engineers effective. The previous Helix work on individual systems engineers is a critical input to this project focus. In 2018, the Helix team shifted from an exclusively workforce focus (within the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) Human Capital Development Strategy area) to encompass how organizations can become more effective at systems engineering as a discipline and includes organizational characteristics that influence the effectiveness of the systems engineering workforce, as well as how they better enable their systems engineering workforce. This paper provides an update on the research including the updated methodology to investigate the organizational systems engineering effectiveness.
Systems engineers sometimes have a bit of an identity crisis. As a multidisciplinary approach, systems engineering overlaps with other disciplines and this can make it difficult to differentiate between what systems engineering “is” and “is not”. Using Sheard's 1996 work on systems engineering roles as a starting point, in 2014 the Helix project began examining the activities systems engineers reported performing in a combination of detailed resumes (or curriculum vitae) and in‐depth interviews. After reviewing the data from nearly 300 systems engineers, leaders and managers of systems engineers, and close peers of systems engineers, the Helix team has updated these roles and developed a structure for thinking about the major types of roles systems engineers play based on the focus of activities: on the system, the organization, or the team. There are now 15 roles, some of which have been modified from Sheard's original 12.
Helix is a multi-year research project of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) that is developing a theory of what makes those who perform systems engineering effective. To support that research, Helix is collecting data from a diverse set of systems engineers, others who perform some systems engineering activities but do not think of themselves as systems engineers, and those who work with systems engineers. Among the data sources available to Helix is the complete set of applications between 2004 and 2013 that were submitted to the INCOSE Systems Engineering Professional Certification Program. This paper reports on the education background of 2504 applicants and includes the number and types of university degrees and how the most popular degrees of applicants have changed over time. The applicants are very well educated, with almost 70% having an advanced college degree. With nearly three-quarters of the applicants coming from the US, education from US universities dominates. At the bachelor level, classical engineering degrees dominate, but computer-related majors are becoming increasingly popular. Two of the most popular masters degrees earned since 2000 are the Master of System Engineering and the Master of Business Administration.
Atlas is a theory of what makes systems engineers effective. The primary data to date on which Atlas is based comes from the U.S. defense community, but indications are that the theory is applicable to other business sectors as well. Based primarily on qualitative analysis of interviews with 287 individuals from 20 organizations in the DoD, defense industrial base, and commercial industry, Atlas identifies the key characteristics of systems engineers, explains what promotes and inhibits their effectiveness, and identifies how organizations are attempting to improve effectiveness of their systems engineering workforce. In Atlas, a systems engineer is considered effective when she consistently delivers value. This fundamental definition of effectiveness hinges on “value.” Although each organization defines what it most values in its systems engineers, the most commonly‐cited values include: keeping and maintaining the system vision, enabling diverse teams to successfully develop systems, managing emergence in both the project and the system, enabling good technical decisions at the system level, supporting the business cases for systems, and translating technical jargon into business or operational terms and vice versa. In order to provide these values, system engineers must have the right proficiencies—knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, and cognition—and the right personal and organizational characteristics to support their work. This paper describes both Atlas and the insight it offers into what makes systems engineers effective.
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