Van Hinte, Ed, and van Tooren, Michel, First Read This: System Engineering in Practice, 010 Publishers, 2008
This publication presents System Engineering in a populist yet quite thorough way. It defines Systems Engineering as supporting design and a medium for communication management during large-scale development projects. Examples range from aircraft to cameras, but focus is still on general aspects of how to handle complex processes. I find the attitude of the book compelling; it is very inspirational, sometimes comical, but still very serious. It involves issues of customer surveys, as well as risk taking, and design innovation. It also features techniques and methods that we have employed or referenced in the Skanska Xchange project such as Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Extreme Programming, but also tells the development history of diagrammatic representations such as Function Breakdown Structure (FBS), Functional Flow Diagram (FFD), the Gantt chart or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
I picked it up at the AA bookstore, first thinking it to be yet another cliché design process evening read, but I do find it more advanced in my first brief reading. I think it´s a resource to go back to later on.
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