INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, 5th Edition

4 TAILORING AND APPLICATION CONSIDERATIONS

This section provides considerations for the application of SE with respect to different methodologies, approaches, system types, product sectors, and application domains.

4.1 TAILORING CONSIDERATIONS

There are many standards and handbooks that address life cycle models and SE processes. However, in most cases, these cannot be directly applied to a given organization or project. There is usually a need to tailor them for the specific project, organization, environment, or other situational factors.

The principle behind tailoring is to adapt the processes to ensure that they meet the needs of an organization or a project while being scaled to the level of rigor that allows the system life cycle activities to be performed with an acceptable level of risk. In general, all system life cycle processes can be applied during all stages of the system life cycle, tailoring determines the process level that applies to each stage. Additionally, processes are applied iteratively, recursively, and concurrently as shown in Figure 2.10.

Tailoring scales the rigor of application to an appropriate level based on risk. Figure 4.1 is a notional graph for balancing formal process against the risk of cost and schedule overruns (Salter, 2003). Insufficient SE effort is generally accompanied by high risk of schedule and cost overruns. If too little rigor is applied, the risk of technical issues increases. However, as illustrated in Figure 4.1, too much ...