Enhancing Engineering Project Management Through Process Alignment

Abstract

In order to lead successful projects, coordinating the different business units of a company is compulsory. This paper proposes a framework to make companies’ practices evolve toward a better alignment of the business units based on their processes, and illustrates it with project management and systems engineering processes. Indeed, all the different organization units intend to serve the common global objective to satisfy the customer needs, and need to closely collaborate during projects. However, work organization in companies often leads to barriers between these stakeholders, with the result of an incoherent decision-making that may compromise project execution. Therefore, the issue of processes alignment from different domains lies at the very heart of ongoing research topics and ranks first among economic and industrial concerns. This paper uses a qualitative approach to show how different business units’ processes can be integrated and illustrate this framework by aligning the systems engineering and project management processes within a certain engineering project context. By using the proposed framework, different teams (or even different companies, in a context of distributed enterprise) can align their practices, while also making them evolve toward a better compliance with standards.

Keywords:

• Systems Engineering
• Project Management
• Standard Alignment
• Process Integration

EMJ Focus Areas:

• Program & Project Management
• Systems Engineering

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rui Xue

Rui Xue, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing University of Technology. She received her PhD degree in industrial engineering in 2016 from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) of the University of Toulouse (France). She received her M.E degree in computer software and theory in the year 2012 from Jilin University. Her research interests are system engineering, project management, system modeling, and decision making.

Claude Baron

Claude Baron, PhD, is a Full Professor in Computer Sciences at INSA, Université de Toulouse, France. She conducts research in systems and software engineering at the LAAS-CNRS laboratory where she leads the Systems Engineering and Integration team. She is interested in modeling, optimizing and smoothing product development processes. Her research work is based on a multidisciplinary and collaborative vision of the design of complex systems. She addresses system modeling and process monitoring, considering embedded and critical systems and applications in avionics and automotive.

Rob Vingerhoeds

Rob Vingerhoeds, PhD, is a Full Professor of Systems Engineering and Head of the Department of Complex Systems Engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO, Université de Toulouse, France. Rob’s research interests include systems engineering and architecture, model-based systems engineering, concept design, the integration of project management and systems engineering, and artificial intelligence techniques. Systems engineering became over time a key topic in his career. Rob is Deputy Editor of the International Scientific Journal “Systems Engineering.”

Philippe Esteban

Philippe Esteban, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse. He conducts his research on system engineering at the LAAS Laboratory of the CNRS (French National Centre for Sciences and Research). He is an expert in the domain of the design and verification of complex and hybrids systems. His predilection domain of application is embedded systems.