Reflection on “Managing Complex Technology Projects by Simon Philbin, April 2008”

The article discussed the complex nature of the technology and engineering projects from a technical as well as management perspective, knowing that the failure of such complex projects is linked to technical and social causes. A strong tool had to be found to overcome these failures and to facilitate the design, and management of the new programs and this is how the System engineering was introduced to the market, knowing that this new tool is not limited to engineering projects, in fact it is being nowadays to biological, financial, and social system/applications.

The article also introduced one approach of the systems engineering that did not come to replace the project management, but to work with it as systematic methodologies in order to manage technical and organizational complexity; that application was the four-frames systems. The four-frames systems view is simply a conceptual framework that was designed to be tool for managing complex technological projects, and what makes it so different than other approaches is the fact that it provides a route map for project managers to help reduce the technical as well as managerial risk for such complex projects.

Additionally, the article discussed the systems engineering within an academic environment instead of industrial environment that represents a real large scale project. The article discussed the system engineering and showed its relation to Project Management. Systems Engineering Management is based on some project management framework concepts, such as Work Breakdown Structure, task organization, and project planning, which makes Systems Engineering and Project Management tightly overlapped domains. Additionally, it was indicated that when no specific product is concerned, the systems engineers inter-correlated the project with the project, under the influence of practicing environment. As a result, not only there is no separation of domains, but also the domains emerge to become significant, of course in the context of a specific project/product.