This paper explores how agile systems engineering (SE) and a simplified approach can augment or complement traditional SE activities for a complex system of systems. The Department of Defense (DoD) Joint All Domain Command and Control effort is identified as a potential candidate to apply agile SE toward, given the number of SE challenges identified during MITRE’s 2022 independent assessment.
This paper explores how agile systems engineering (SE) and a simplified approach can augment or complement traditional SE activities for a complex system of systems. The Department of Defense (DoD) Joint All Domain Command and Control effort is identified as a potential candidate to apply agile SE toward, given the number of SE challenges identified during MITRE’s 2022 independent assessment. Taking an agile, federated, and “bottom-up” approach does not require abandoning rigor in systems engineering. Rather, that rigor should be applied to meeting user needs, ensuring working products, and rapidly iterating to fix issues and extend capabilities. Architectures, standards, and interface controls should not be abandoned, but they should be simplified where possible and “grow” into a working minimum viable product.
A key point made in this article is that a bias for action must be undertaken to start somewhere, even if it is not the ideal starting point, so that the DoD can experiment, learn, adapt, and iterate toward a working solution from a simple beginning.