OVERVIEW

Application of supportability engineering to a system is as much about timing as it is about technique. In other words, when something is done may be far more important than what is being done. For example, realizing that you bought the wrong car after you have had it for seven years is interesting but does not have value because you have had the wrong car for seven years. The same knowledge has extreme value if it can be realized before you buy the car that it is not the right one for you. Timing is more important than degree of accuracy. The realization after seven years of ownership may be factual and based on the actual expenditure of money for use and repair of the car. It would have been far better if those costs could have been estimated before you decided which car to buy and therefore avoided the wrong car. This, in a nutshell, is supportability engineering: participating in decisions about a system to achieve the lowest cost of ownership while still meeting the minimum use requirements. It is this participation in the decision-making process that is the key to success, and the decision-making process is orchestrated by systems architecting and systems engineering.

Each of these activities will be described in Chapter 3, but it is necessary to understand the concepts of system life, system ownership, and the decision-making processes before the ideas presented in this book can be applied properly. Therefore, this chapter discusses...