| Many of the key products and services that improve the lives of people, and/or are vital to the defense of our Nation, are the result of large-scale engineering projects. Despite decades of theoretical and practical work in the art of systems engineering and project management, project execution results remain somewhat inconsistent, in the sense that many projects fail to produce a product that meets the original specifications, and many more projects achieve some measure of technical success only after taking significantly more time and/or money than originally expected.;Many of the most interesting and important such systems that are needed by society, by their very size, require, large teams to perform the necessary work. In any large set of people, however, there will be a distribution of skills and capabilities across the individuals forming the team. Yet current technical systems engineering design techniques do not explicitly account for this distribution of personnel skill, and hence provide no method of explicitly partitioning the work up into "skill bins" whose distribution might match the skill distribution of the team. Such a mismatch of job demands against personnel skills is a potential root cause of project failures, schedule delays, and cost over-runs.;The research described herein assessed (through case studies on large system development programs) the potential of a candidate design-based improvement technique for performing such a partitioning of the design / implementation of a complex system into such skill bins. The specific technique examined aims to reduce unplanned and adverse dynamic behavior in the resulting system through design-phase actions that centralize control of the eventual system's dynamic behavior, and implement that centralization as a particular instance of a partitioning of the work. This approach could lead to increased success on future major system development projects, through a better matching of work to personnel, and better insight into one method for instituting better control of the dynamic behavior of such a system.;The study examined a particular method of implementing the partitioning-by-skill of the work on a large, complex system development project into separate portions, where most are explicitly intended to be easier than average, while a small portion are intended to be more difficult than average. The study showed that use of this technique resulted in better project outcomes, as measured by an indicated set of metrics. This particular method was examined first in one application problem domain, and then in four additional application problem domains. This result is likely to be of value, given the high failure rate still experienced on such system development projects. |
