Roadmap: Performance Measurement for Systems Engineering
This roadmap provides an overview of the initial performance measurement practices for Systems Engineering.
Main Description

The Performance Measurement practices help you to set up and operate a performance measurement system to help you understand whether your organization is performing as desired, and guide you in what actions to take to improve your performance:

In this release we are providing an initial approach to measurements, reports and improvement actions for the business improvement dimension Reduce Cost, one of five main dimensions that we have found relevant for almost all organizations that we have worked with.

The approach to measured improvement is based upon a multi-level model of business objectives, operational objectives and (execution) control measure which is supported by a network or association to support reasoning about capabilities and their impact. This network and combined model is called a Value Traceability Tree (VTT) - see Concept: Value Traceability Tree.

IBM offers a sample VTT based on experience. This VTT can speed up the selection of new capabilities, including metrics to use during deployment to monitor outcomes and tune adoption. These new capabilities are deployed using process guidance (the Practices, Tool Mentors, Tool Guidance, Artifacts, Reports and dashboards provided here) and tools (IBM Rational products like Rational Team Concert, DOORS and Rhapsody). The VTTs supplied can be extended and focused for other specific dimensions, such as compliance or audit.

For this initial VTT for Systems Engineering improvement we focus on Reduce Cost, and specifically the reduction of engineering cost, a contributor to system lifecycle cost - see Operational Objective: Reduce Cost.

In the Practices for Performance Measurement we provide suggestions for this primary dimension, of Reduce Cost, for the measures to leverage to understand whether an improvement project meets your target objectives, including reports to consider. You find that further drill down leads to descriptions of metrics, and that many metrics have guidance on how to interpret them and what corrective actions to take based on what they are showing.

These same project level metrics and reports can be used to measure performance across a set of projects. Value Traceability Trees (VTTs) guide you in what systemic improvement actions to take. The VTT for each dimension, articulates strategies and solutions that can provide a systemic improvement in performance, symptoms to look for to determine which strategies and solutions to apply, and the practices, and metrics and tools that help you effectively implement target solutions.

When you are making changes to how you work, you want to make sure those changes lead to better results. These Performance Measurement practices (Setting up a Performance Measurement System and Managing Performance through Measurements) guide you in how to effectively set up and leverage multi-tier measurement system to both understand whether you get the desired outcome (through outcome measures), and whether the improvement actions you are taking are effectively implemented (through control measures).

Additional improvement Strategies, Solutions and Metrics are available from the base IBM Performance Management System.