Design and Development of Aircraft Systems, 3rd Edition

8Practical Considerations

8.1 Introduction

The design and development of aircraft systems is something that takes place in collections of organisations including customers, prime contractors, and suppliers. In order for the process to work correctly there must be some disciplines imposed in the organisations. This chapter examines some processes which, whilst not technical, are absolutely required to result in the right technical product. First, the chapter looks at the business process and in the later sections some more technical aspects are examined.

The good systems engineer is always prepared to learn from other people's experience, and this chapter is intended to provide an insight into the practical world of systems engineering. Learning from experience, from one's peers, from one's competitors, and from the good and bad experiences of others is the pragmatic approach to learning, and some research has shown that formal methods of introducing learning into teams can be applied to good effect (Meakin and Wilkinson 2002). Figure 8.1 illustrates the learning from experience model. This model shows that learning from experience is different to knowledge management. Whilst explicit knowledge can be collected, stored, and manipulated, wisdom is the result of experience and other factors such as luck, insight, judgement etc., and creation of new wisdom is the result of shared experience rather than extracting information from a database. This seemingly trivial statement is ...