Systems Engineering
The successful introduction of technology to augment an organization’s mission and operation requires a comprehensive assessment of organization priorities, customer-centric consideration of the myriad options for addressing their needs and a risk-managed approach for progressing from requirements to realization. A commonly-overlooked key factor in the systems engineering processing is the importance of identifying the appropriate body of solution stakeholders and garnering their engagement throughout the effort lifecycle. Since needs may change as the organization’s priorities shift, it is imperative that a systems engineering approach incorporate sufficient flexibility to adapt accordingly ensuring the end solution remains viable and conveys as an effective response to the client’s needs. This approach requires that systems engineering processes encourage ongoing engagement with the stakeholders to promote activity transparency and provide opportunities for realignment of engineering activities in accordance with variance in the client mission and operations.
Exceptional provides a full range of systems engineering services consistent with meeting the challenges of our academic, commercial, local and federal government clients. Our staff of highly skilled professionals is well-versed in a wide array of system engineering methodologies and practices from DoDAF to Capability Maturity Model Integration-Dev (CMMI) models. Having served as lead architects on numerous global and multi-national engineering initiatives, we understand the issues of evolving solutions that are consistent with regional imperatives and compliant with disparate governance bodies and organizational doctrines. From secure LAN architectures to globe-spanning high assurance infrastructures, Exceptional has a team of engineering professionals that can help you to address your most challenging systems engineering endeavors.
At Exceptional, we commonly advocate the use of agile approaches as a philosophy for promoting flexibility and ensuring continuous alignment of our systems and software development and engineering efforts with client needs. Though we advocate the use of agile approaches to deliver responsive and effective solutions to our clients, we understand that for some customers a more classical engineering approach may be more consistent with their capability maturity, governance and delivery guidelines. Accordingly, Exceptional staff are versed in the full scope of classical engineering lifecycles (e.g. Waterfall, Spirals, etc.) as well as prominent agile methodologies periodically merging approaches (i.e. classical initial iteration, agile progressions) to provide a customer-specific engineering model consistent with their requirements. A representative of list activities that our systems engineering staff provides include:
- Requirements Development
- Developing requirements to meet engineering needs, while ensuring that operational shortfalls are addressed and quick solutions are executed (DOORS experts)
- Conceptualization & Architecture Validation
- Concept Vision
- Review of contributive operational, system, and procedure or doctrine materials to aide in proper characterization of solution operating environment
- Market Survey & Candidate Assessment
- Discovery and assessment of community offerings
- Validating solution candidate and products
- System Design & Refinement
- Infrastructure Design
- Critical Component Specification
- Information Flows & Exchanges
- Staged Storage
- Continuity & Sustainment Engineering
- Testing
- Drafting of test plans and procedures in cooperation with stakeholders
- Implementation & Deployment
- Equipment mockup & Racking
- Baselining/Configuration
- Custom Component Fabrication
- System Component Integration
- Operational Lifecycle Planning
- Evaluating and providing course corrections to ensure the efficacy of near-term and long-term implementations of information technologies over multiyear planning cycles (SETA advisers)