Recent Courses
Fundamentals of Enterprise Systems
Traditional systems engineering techniques must be adapted to understand a broader class of human designed systems that we refer to as an enterprise, of which a technical system is only one part. Students will learn how describe the value of systems engineering on complex projects, provide a (common) global view of the system and enterprise, elicit and write good requirements, and understand how to develop robust and efficient architectures. Students should complete this class with "next steps" knowledge of tools, templates, capability patterns, and community. Case studies and examples are used throughout to give students an appreciation of how systems engineering tools, techniques, and thinking can be applied to the real world enterprises that we encounter daily.
Governing Development
For a variety of business reasons, today’s business and government organizations are demonstrating a heightened interest in governance. Development programs and organizations have unique governance concerns due to inherent uncertainty of development efforts. Moving beyond platitudes, this course introduces modern concepts of organizational governance and their application to organizations that develop systems and products. Course topics include the business climate forcing an emphasis on governance; a general governance framework, including definitions of governance elements; governance as a process; governance solutions for the development teams; development governance styles; and advanced topics.
Research Methods
Research philosophy, ethics, and methodology will be discussed. Each student will, under the guidance of the instructor, formulate a problem, search the literature, and develop a research design. In addition, the student will examine and criticize research reports with special emphasis on the statement of the problem, the sampling and measuring techniques that are used, and the analyses and interpretation of the data. Emphasis is on applying research methodology to real-world organizational problems.
Modeling and Simulation
This course covers contemporary decision support models of forecasting, optimization and simulation for management. Students will learn how to identify the problem situation, choose the appropriate methods, collect the data and find the solution. The course also covers handling the information and generating alternative decisions based upon operations research optimization, statistical simulation, and systems dynamic forecasting. Computer simulations will be performed on PCs using user-friendly graphical interface with multimedia report generation for visualization and animation. Students will also be trained in management simulations for group decision support.