Implementation of Systems Engineering: A maturity-based approach

Due to an increasing amount of software and electronics, future technical systems will be significantly more capable than current ones, but also more complex. This increase in complexity leads to growing challenges in the context of product development. In industry, Systems Engineering (SE) is seen as a promising development approach to handle these challenges. However, despite great efforts in some cases, companies struggle with a variety of challenges when introducing SE. This paper presents an approach to facilitate the introduction of SE especially for small and medium-sized companies. For this purpose, we have developed a maturity-based implementation strategy. This strategy enables companies to determine their status and to derive strategic goals regarding their SE capability. As a first step, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to evaluate the current state of the art of SE based maturity models. We found four relevant approaches, which only cover partial areas of the introduction of SE. Subsequently, we present our approach, which was developed within a research project. In this model, the SE maturity level is determined in 3 assessment dimensions with the help of 20 action areas. Our approach is characterized in particular by an additional info box. It provides the evaluators with additional information and reflection questions for each action area to simplify the evaluation. Finally, we validate the maturity model with an industrial company.