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Engineering Systems Integration
will be improved by having a reference log with adequate details to chronicle the work activities and events. The significance of this log is understood
by the fundamental notion of planning: planning is only about the future.
The job of the task manager (and the supervision of the management, in
general) is to focus on establishing the procedures for readying all objects
for integration based on the strategy of reducing a multiobject problem to a
two- or three-object problem. This strategy is referred to as the recursive
strategy (Zhang and Norman 1994).
Planning deals with the future of present decision. According to Steiner
(1969), planning is a process which begins with objectives; defines strategies,
policies, and detailed plans to achieve them; establishes an organization to
implement decisions; and includes a review of performance and feedback to
introduce a new planning cycle. According to Drucker (1959), planning is a
continuous process of making present risk-taking decisions systematically.
It involves the best information about the future, it organizes the efforts needed
to carry out decisions, and it provides for measuring the results of the decisions against the expectations. Planning includes who, what, where, when,
why, and how to be done in the future. For integration planning (as for all
planning), planning is not forecasting.* Planning is the charting of the course
to find the most probable future events. Planning is not what you would like
to do, want to do, or in fact, need to do. Planning is doing what you will do to
make happen what you must do. Integration planning is the process of establishing realistic objectives and the strategy to bring objects together in a systematic, logical fashion to show functionality that demonstrates (1) subfunctions
within a thread of a system function, (2) multiple subfunctions that interact
with each other, and (3) end-to-end (system) threads that illustrate the integrative effects on system behaviors. In the short term (before verifying functionalities), planning focuses on anticipating the unforeseen. The more plan Bs
(i.e., backup plans), the better in the early days before object-to-object integration. This notion that planning can help deal with problems is philosophically
based, borne out in anecdotages, and now steeped in the honored position of
common practice. For integration planning, it is more than meets our perceptions. In a systems engineering environment replete with changes in requirements, missing requirements, and requirements that are left unsaid (and
perhaps left undone), integration planning must deal with more than just the
complexities of the project (which includes the people and the results of their
work), and integration planning is the single-most visible element of how well
the project is progressing. All the indications of well-being that occur offer
false hopes and deceptive elusions of milestone completions. It is not until
integration that the true nature of the work is exposed and put to the first real
tests or viability. The planning of integration must endeavor to find the most
probable course of future events that will result in achieving the project objectives.
* Forecasting attempts to project the probable future events, often based on modeling or
simulation (e.g., weather forecasting).