ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards set out requirements or guidance to help organizations manage their policies and processes to achieve specific objectives.
ISO 15288 is a systems engineering standard covering processes and lifecycle stages. It defines a set of processes and associated terminology from an engineering viewpoint. These processes can be applied at any level in the hierarchy of a system’s structure.
Selected sets of these processes can be applied throughout the life cycle for managing and performing the stages of a system’s life cycle. This is accomplished through the involvement of all stakeholders, with the ultimate goal of achieving customer satisfaction.
Additionally, ISO 15288 provides processes that support the definition, control and improvement of the system life cycle processes used within an organization or a project. Organizations and projects can use these processes when acquiring and supplying systems.
This international standard can be applied to all types of systems and system elements consisting of one or more of the following: hardware, software, humans, processes, procedures, facilities and naturally occurring entities.
The use of the International Standard for systems within this broad scope is one of its main advantages. The use of the standard may be adapted to accommodate the varying project requirements in treating system life cycles. This may be performed by adjusting the scope as described in Clause 4.2 and tailoring described in Clause 4.4 of this Technical Report and Annex A of the International Standard.
The value of the 15288 standards is not in the rote performance of the processes and technical reviews they define. Rather, it is in the thought processes and resulting outcomes of the activities that enable better decision making from both technical and programmatic perspectives.
As such, the objective should not be to mandate strict task-level conformance to the standards or to require task-level verification of compliance, but to ensure that the intent of the standard is met in a way that is most efficient and effective to achieve the outcomes and outputs expected by performance of the processes.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers ISO 15288 Training, a 3-day workshop where participants learn how to use ISO/IEC/IEEE8 15288 standard, “Systems and Software Engineering–System Life Cycle Processes,” for use by acquisition and system projects.
ISO 15288 Training, ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 training covers how ISO/IEC/IEEE8 15288 standard establishes a common process framework for describing the life cycle of man-made systems and defines a set of systems engineering (SE) processes and associated terminology typical for the full system life cycle, including conception, development, production, utilization, support and retirement.
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