A journey through the system landscape (A Journey Through the Systems Landscape)

Harold "Bud" Lawson's book is interesting, but hard enough to read:) Maybe it’s because systems engineering is complicated, or maybe it’s because Harold was one of the creators of the ISO standard. 15288 Systems engineering. And if you read the standards, you know how “exciting” they are. In fact, the book is quite old. (2013 year) It's more like a textbook, and it has eight chapters and four real-world examples.

Here is a list of chapters with comments:

1. Introduction to systems - a brief introduction to the whole book, the main issues: systems everywhere, their classification, systems thinking and systems engineering, target systems, change management and work with the complexity of the system
2. Systems thinking Systems thinking, hard and soft systems, modeling and models
3. Activities in the language of systems - OODA cycles. (Observe - Orient - Decide - Act) and PDCA (Plan - Do - Check - Act)Models and processes of life cycle systems
4. System: descriptions and implementations Lifecycle transformation, key success factors, system architecture
5. Change management Cybernetics and How to Collect System Performance Indicators (Measure of Effectiveness, Measure of Performance, Balanced Score Card (KPI)Maturity of processes)And then on to making decisions. (SWOT, Decision Trees, Entropy Phenomenon)And then about making changes.
6. Managing the life cycle of systems - V-model, spiral model. Roles and responsibilities throughout the life cycle. Separately about product life cycles
7. Data, information and knowledge First about taxonomy and anthology, and then about creative thinking. (synectics, concept maps) and learning organization
8. Organization and enterprise as systems About how everything said before is transferred to the company. A little about the architecture of the company

Here's the tour list. (case-case) with comments:

1. An example from the field of crisis management - the birth of SWAT departments in Los Angeles as a police response to crime, which the line departments could not cope with.
2. An example from the field of organizational development is the decentralized culture of the cereal Swedish Bank Handelsbanken.
3. Architectural Concepts and Principles: Introduction of an Automated Train Control System in Sweden
4. example from the field of life cycle management of ontology - the most boring example about the development of ontology taking into account the recommendations of ISO 15288

In general, the book is good, but difficult to study. From the beginning of the reading until its end, I had about 2 months:)

#SystemEngineering #Engineering #SystemDesign