Systems engineering: Challenging complexity

You will learn to identify and evaluate the importance of relationships within the process and assess the relative importance of stakeholders. You will also be able to classify a systems engineering project in terms of the balance of demands, choice and constraints.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Evaluate a specific example or case of a product development process in terms of the ‘waterfall’ life cycle model of software development
• Classify new product developments as: fault correction, enhancements, new but similar products, radically different, revolutionary or iconoclastic products
• Analyse the causes of a systems failure
• Identify and evaluate the importance of the relationships of the factors leading up to system complication and complexity
• Answer the question ‘why is systems engineering important?