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In the early 1950's the development of large, complex systems encountered two major challenges: (1) traditional Engineering methods were inadequate for coordinating and communicating designs and changes across multiple disciplines; and (2) projects were incurring unmanageable technical failures, cost overruns, and schedule slips. Exacerbating these challenges were growing conflicts between management and the engineers and scientists performing the engineering. These two challenges manifested themselves in the form of a “management gap,” which emerged due to management frustrations with engineers and scientists’ inability to articulate how the engineering process was performed, and (2) a “technology gap,” which emerged due to engineers and scientists’ frustrations with management's inability to understand how engineering was performed and the new technologies being implemented. Central to these issues was the threat to the prevalent 1950's management paradigm of exercising authoritative control over subordinates by planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling the tasks engineers and scientists performed. Corrective action solutions were urgently needed. Rather than solving the challenges, government as the acquirer of large, complex systems, decided to regain authoritative control over its contractors. As a result, the concept of Systems Management was introduced and mandated via a series of Systems, SE, and Engineering Management process standards. Over the past 60+ years, the emerging field of Systems Engineering (SE), which originally focused on answering a key engineering question “Will the system work – i.e., ‘be fit for purpose’ when realized? (Ring, 2017) shifted to “did we follow our processes?” Projects corrected a “management” problem while neglecting the “engineering” question. As a result, projects continue to exhibit systemic performance issues. It is time to shift this outdated Systems Management paradigm and reestablish SE core competency as the “engine” for correcting SE contributions to project performance issues that seem so intractable.

The "engineering of systems" performed in many organizations is often characterized as chaotic, ineffective, and inefficient. Objective evidence of these characteristics is reflected in program performance metrics such as non-compliance to requirements, overrun budgets, and late schedule deliveries. Causal analysis reveals a number of factors contribute to this condition: a lack of technical leadership, a lack of understanding the user's problem / solution spaces, point design architectures and solutions, a lack of integrated decision making, et al. Further analysis indicates these factors are symptomatic of a much larger competency issue traceable to undergraduate engineering education -the lack of a course in Systems Engineering fundamentals taught by seasoned instructors with robust, industrial experience acquired from a diversity of small to large, complex systems. This paper explores the ad hoc, chaotic, and dysfunctional nature of technical planning and execution. We trace its origins to the industrial Plug and Chug … Specify-Design-Build-Test-Fix Paradigm and its predecessor Plug and Chug … Design-Build-Test-Fix Paradigm acquired informally in engineering school. Whereas these paradigms may be effective for academic application, they are not suitable or scalable to larger, complex system, product, or service development efforts.The solution is to bolster the competency of the engineering workforce at two stages: 1) upgrade undergraduate engineering education to include a System Engineering fundamentals course and 2) shift the industrial System Engineering paradigm through education and training to employ scalable SE problem solving / solution development methodologies for projects ranging in size from small to large, complex systems.

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