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Systems Engineering for Defence Conference
15-Feb-2012
Shrivenham, 14 and 15 February 2012
BMT Hi-Q Sigma’s Managing Consultant, Dr James Goodwin is presenting at the Systems Engineering in Defence Conference 2012. This year’s conference will cover the following themes:
- Overall strategy for engineering in Defence, the rationale, what MOD is doing and how might others contribute
- Engineering management of projects and programmes, and the role of engineers in informing decision-making
- Competencies required for future systems professionals, both hard and soft
- Skills development and associated educational responses required from the academic community
At the conference BMT Hi-Q Sigma are presenting a poster entitled “Navigating from Problem to Solution: An Integrated Perspective”
Enterprise Change Management is a term which refers to the transition of an organisation’s systems, processes and people from a current (as-is) to a desired future (to-be) state. Typically, change management is decomposed into silos, with project management, systems engineering, financial control and risk management undertaken as distinct activities.
These decision making silos can limit change success. Firstly, the disciplines may overlap, leading to tension and misunderstanding between teams. This problem is understandable when examining the overlap of Programme Management and Systems Engineering roles and responsibilities identified in the APM PMBOK and INCOSE SEBOK. These overlaps are not purely apparent across PM and SE disciplines, but throughout enterprise change, such as risk management, assumptions making or engineering design. Secondly, silos can impose communication barriers, leading to poor coherency across the change initiative.
Rather than tackle symptoms of these failures (tension and poor communication), this paper examines the core elements of change. Effective change is based upon the inter-dependence between these elements, i.e. it is based upon the total integration and effective communication between these elements of change. Managers and engineers should therefore place their efforts in communication and knowledge management, rather than the individual elements of change.
For further details on this conference please click on http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/cds/symposia/sed.html
James is an engineer with experience in systems engineering, project management, programme management, enterprise architecture and business analysis. James specialises in using systems thinking techniques to build a coherent approach to business, change management and systems engineering problems, focusing much of his effort upon knowledge transfer and mentoring.
James has provided a wide range of systems engineering and management advice/guidance/deliverables to defence, offshore, aerospace and government projects and programmes.
James holds an MEng in Systems and Control Engineering, is a Prince2 Practitioner, MSP Practioner and Chartered Engineer. He is an active Member of INCOSE, sitting on the UK Advisory Board.
During his part-time PhD, James developed an architectural framework for managing robot/unmanned vehicle System-Of-System (SOS) development. This framework is currently being used in academia and industry as the basis for requirements capture and design.