System Management

The second edition of a bestseller, System Management: Planning, Enterprise Identity, and Deployment demonstrates how to make systems development work for any organization. Updated with new chapters, examples, and figures, it discusses the optimum marriage between specific program planning and a company's generic identity. The author focuses on the management aspects of the functional departments and programs and highlights the areas that must be improved in order to implement outstanding systems capability.

The book examines the "what and why" of a process and includes a detailed example of a common process model and discusses how to document one. The author builds the case for a matrix structure in which the enterprise has several programs in the house at any one time, the complex problems these programs must solve, and the need for information from many different knowledge domains. He explores the rationale behind placing a generic process under a central management authority with contributions from all functional departments. The book then covers two sets of program planning strings based on the product entity structure and organizes management techniques for the three fundamental system developments efforts: requirements analysis, synthesis, and verification. It concludes with a discussion of assessment and improvement.

Recognizing the three areas involved in the development of any new or updated system―the system under development, the enterprise itself, and the program within the enterprise responsible for the development work―this book examines how all three of these systems should be developed using the principals of system engineering. Clearly identifying the important elements of the enterprise and program information sets that have to be skillfully manipulated, it covers strategies that help organizations already using a systems approach fine tune their systems and give those not using a systems approach the tools to develop systems of their own.

Jeffrey O. Grady