Enhanced concurrent engineering: an approach for accelerating the systems engineering process while minimizing the risk

Good systems engineering practices and procedures take time. The demands of the information economy market place have placed demands on systems engineering teams to develop systems faster while using an increasing number of new state-of-the-art, often unproven, components. Consequently, teams are often pressured to compress or skip over proven processes and check points in order to reduce the systems development life cycle (SDLC) time requirements. The risk of such an approach are information technology solutions which do not fully meet the customer's requirements, are difficult to operate and maintain, are less reliable than desired, are prone to errors and failures and/or do not migrate effectively to the next phase of development. Concurrent engineering has been used to help system engineering teams reduce the SDLC time requirements. Concurrent engineering is defined as a systematic approach to creating a product design that simultaneously considers all elements of the product life cycle, from conception through disposal..."/sup 1/ It is a critical part of the rapid application development technique as well as the joint application development technique. This paper recasts the SDLC approach through a comprehensive overview of an enhanced concurrent engineering process.