This free course, Systems engineering: Challenging complexity, examines system engineering and why it is important. You will learn to identify and evaluate the importance of relationships within the process and assess the relative importance of stakeholders. You will also be able to classify a systems engineering project in terms of the balance of demands, choice and constraints.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
evaluate a specific example or case of a product development process in terms of the 'waterfall' life cycle model of software development
classify new product developments as: fault correction, enhancements, new but similar products, radically different, revolutionary or iconoclastic products
analyse the causes of a systems failure
identify and evaluate the importance of the relationships of the factors leading up to system complication and complexity
answer the question 'why is systems engineering important?
I found this course to have been an excellent introduction to Systems Engineering because of the way it presents this subject as a methodology for managing complexity. However, I've noticed that there are several instances of "denned" through the course which I believe is a typo that is supposed to be "defined". The most recent occurrence that I've come across is from section 4.2: Gradually, the accepted name for this type of policy analysis became ‘systems analysis’, which an early practitioner [denned] as... I am not sure whom to contact about such issues.