What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?
Projects without Systems Engineers, and Systems Engineers without projects
Following up on the over auditability issues I talked about in a previous article, maybe it is worth commenting about one of its causes.
Projects are never supposed to be *just* projects. I mean, a project is a way of organizing work in order to produce something as an outcome. But projects never exist for the sake of the projects themselves. To build a new bridge for connecting two neighboring cities, you organize the work to achieve this, but what you want to get is…a bridge. People cannot go visit their relatives across the river on board a gantt chart or a spreadsheet.
Doesn’t this sound too obvious? Still, alas, “pure” projects do exist, and their nature is unsurprisingly dull: pure administrative nonsense because there is basically nothing else to do than pushing papers.
When a technical project—understanding “technical project” as any collective endeavor supposed to produce an usable, operable, technical artifact—neglects the necessary technical interactions and discussions needed for producing such outcome, its destination is an unremarkable place in history: yet another project that kept people busy for years only to pay the bills and be forgotten forever.
Despite all the noise around the concept, Systems Engineering was naturally conceived to take that role: pushing forward the technical activities to achieve the desired outcome, and fill any other technical gaps that may appear in the process. Project managers, as good husbands, wives, sons and daughters as they might be, cannot in general define the technical path ahead or set forth the discussions needed to create complex systems.
A technical project without Systems Engineering is like a cargo ship adrift in an ocean of deliverables, fake requirements, rotting gantt charts, hideous block diagrams, and pointless meetings where the topics to discuss are things like tables of content.
On the other hand, a project populated only with systems engineers and no project managers is a project equally destined to failure: baroque, overengineered, expensive, and under perennial development. Using the bridge analogy again, a bridge product of pure systems engineering will have 20 lanes each side stacked in a 3D layout, all while generating its own power by its IoT-controlled nuclear reactor.
It is quite amusing when people argue around a supposed “overlap” between Project Management and Systems Engineering. Their relationship is more of a mutualistic symbiosis1 than a redundant one. They are the legs any technical endeavor needs for walking from conception to delivery. Leave a project without one or another, and just sit to observe it stumble like a drunken sailor.
Hee roar, up she rouses,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?
See, most people have a higher than average number of legs. How so? Well, the vast majority of people have two legs. But some people have no legs or one leg. So the average number of legs will be just slightly less than 2, meaning most people have an above average number of legs. Same statistics apply to projects worldwide.
Note that symbiosis can also be parasitic, where one actor just exploits and mostly likely harms the other one. And yes, some projects may show this kind of symbiosis.