Alignment of practices for an efficient management of Systems Engineering processes during the development of systems of systems

Nowadays, because of the increasing complexity of systems and projects, more and more people focus on the systems of systems. At the same time, Systems Engineering and Project Management are considered as two independent activities during the development of systems of systems, but many inconsistencies appear between Systems Engineering and Project Management teams during engineering projects although their relationships is needed to be integrated as they get involved in large scale systems of systems. For the most part, these inconsistencies are due to a not close enough coordination and sometimes a lack of communication. As a result, there is a great need for international companies to understand the standards or guides from both domains to better integrate them and enhance their chances of success. Although numerous Systems Engineering and Project Management standards or guides have been published to help people get better organized and improve the quality of products or services, a lot of their projects still fail due to the poor integration of both domains. At the same time, the number of small and medium enterprises has quickly increased because the social division of labor is becoming more and more meticulous with the rapid development of the science and technology. The ability for small and medium enterprises to analyze and apply the Systems Engineering and Project Management standards or guides is not the same as for international companies, due to their limited resources. So the aim of this paper is to select two references from the most frequently used standards or guides in Systems Engineering and Project Management domains, the ISO/IEC 15288 and the PMBoK, and to illustrate how to help the systems engineers and project managers to compare and align the references from both domains quickly and effectively.