A methodology for design of a system development program organization

The objective of this research is to develop a methodology for designing program organizations responsible for the development of complex aerospace and defense (A&D) systems. The development of complex A&D systems usually span several years and often decades. Development goes through several phases in the process where the nature and structure of the organizations responsible for the development of the A&D systems evolve (sometimes radically) in order to achieve the objectives of the next phase. These organizations are considered to be Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) by many systems engineers. Their evolution is in part controlled through planning and in part through reactive responses to its success and failures. Prior to the development of the Program Organizational Architecture Framework (POAF) described in this dissertation the methods used to design an organization were lacking an ontology to describe the organization. In addition, there was no recognized framework for the design of program organizations that considered their natural evolution.