Engineering Project Management

3Performing Engineering on Projects (Part II)

In this chapter, I continue our summary of the key aspects of how we do engineering on projects, covering the remaining stages of the engineering life‐cycle, from “implementation” all the way through to “phase‐out and disposal.”

3.1 The Remaining Stages of the Project Life‐Cycle

In Chapter 2, we introduced the system method and then discussed the initial stages of the project life‐cycle, concentrating on the requirements and the design.

In this chapter, we discuss the remaining stages of the project life‐cycle, from implementation to phase‐out and disposal (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Showing in which chapter we discuss which stages of the project life‐cycle.

3.1.1 Implementation

Through the design process (described in the previous chapter), we decomposed our system into a set of pieces, each of which might involve physical structures, electronics, software, data, and other elements. Each piece might consist of only one sort of constituent (e.g. be entirely software, or be entirely a physical structure, or be entirely data, etc.), or might be a multiple of these in combination.

In the implementation phase, we build each of these individual pieces. We use the design created (and written down in the form of formal design documents) during the design phase as guidance for each piece of implementation. If we have done our decomposition ...