This paper illustrates how systems engineering is conducted at the lower end of the business, where the customer usually will not pay for the design of a system unless the costs are integrated into the price of the delivered product. Many low-end customers do not have a clear concept of what they want a practitioner to provide. This paper presents the practitioner's view of engineering in the small, and demonstrates a strategy for finding out what the customer really wants.

Degree of conjointness between task structure, organizational structure and personal value system determines how well individuals and teams accomplish tasks. People cope with the demands of situations in accordance with (predominantly) one of eight value systems. Many approaches to motivation are based on “one size fits all,” assumptions. Value system analysis allows one to select personnel whose value system is conjoinable to task and organizational structure. Total Quality Management (TQM) often fails because it assumes consistent responses from employees. The “emergent, cyclical double‐helix model of adult biopsychosocial development,” is a tool which enables matching people to tasks, managers and peers through value system analysis. Root causes of the failure of TQM and the lack of universal acceptance of the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming are clarified through value systems analysis. Illustrative scenarios are presented. A general procedure for staffing teams is outlined.

Design is a series of nested decisions which lead from the abstract to the concrete. Most design decisions involve multiple objectives and multiple criteria. Criteria have relative importance, a range of expression and order of preference within that range. This paper presents a method by which design decisions can be approached. The set of standard scoring functions developed by Wymore enable encoding of relatively complex system performance parameters in an easily manipulated trade study (multiobjective decision technique). The twelve basic shapes translate measurements made of system parameters into a standard score (utility). The resulting set of representations are then weighted and combined to create a single measure of relative effectiveness across a set of system criteria.

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Systems Engineering is an existing reality but what is it? Many definitions exist but there seems to be no universally accepted one. Is it a process, a department, or an engineering discipline? From whence did it come and upon what fundamental scientific, mathematical, or logical facts does its foundation rest? The author team intends, over a period of time, to research earlier related work reported upon in National Council on Systems Engineering (NCOSE) publications and other literature, explore these questions in new research, and periodically report progress to NCOSE membership through Symposium papers and presentations and NCOSE Journal papers. This paper begins this process reporting on an intended course of action, identifying the people involved, soliciting the interest of others in pursuing these questions, and offering preliminary results. The initial work reported upon entails identification of a team, its mission, and several theories that will be pursued in research efforts by subteams seeking to support those theories or prove them false. The careful reader will see in this process a merger of the systems approach and the scientific method as a basis for the research project. The several theories are alternative scenarios that will be explored. The final result may be to show that some combination of the theories offers the complete answer supporting the notion that we are inflicted with competing alternative theories at present because we are all looking at specific manifestations of a more general concept than we are presently able to observe and describe. We should be seeking a simpler and more elegant structure that embraces all of our views. We say that we will apply the scientific method but also recognize that this venerated method may be part of the problem inhibiting people from recognizing the critical role that people play in the systems approach. While the team enters this study with the predisposition that systems theory and qualitative and quantitative methodologies offer promise, we will not close our eyes to the possibilities exposed through study of positive and postmodern paradigms. From time to time the team may find it necessary to terminate interest in one theory, merge findings into a grander view, or initiate additional analytical channels.