Page Text: online course on modern systems thinking
based on engineering and management international standards
What this course teaches
how to put the whole project in your head as a whole: not to miss something important
in the hustle and bustle;
how to overcome complexity: think about a complex project in parts, without losing sight of the whole;
how do engineers, managers, entrepreneurs agree on what kind of system they
are making.
What tasks will the course help to solve?
How to keep your attention in the project
At any moment of the project, systems thinking makes it necessary to keep attention on entrepreneurial opportunities, external project roles, system definition and system realization, works, methods of performing these works, and the team. You will become familiar with the project system diagram as a checklist that links all of these objects to track the status of the project as a whole.
How not to lose touch with reality
Systems thinking will require you to make the system physical: if the project does not change the physical world, creating or changing some kind of system in it, then you can not do it at all, nothing will change! We will teach you how to understand what exactly is changing in the physical world if you create computer programs, services, documentation, enterprises.
How to define your own and others' roles in a project
Until the 80s of the last century, systems thinking did not pay attention to the people in the project, but modern systems thinking makes it necessary to think about the external project and internal team roles that people play in the project. The difficulty here is that in systems thinking you need to think not about the people themselves, but about the roles they play: the roles of engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, law enforcement officers, doctors, etc. The course teaches to distinguish a person in projects, his project / activity role, his position, his qualifications / competence.
How to think the same about an enterprise and its products
Systems thinking is equally applicable to engineering (how to think about the product of a project), to management (how to think about an enterprise carrying out a project), to entrepreneurship (how to think about who and where the product of a project can be used).
What will you get on the course
(In addition to clarity in the head)
Ability to speak using
the concepts of a systems approach
The main content of the course is based
on the international standards for systems engineering and management. We provide basic terms, which greatly facilitates understanding of the material and helps
to talk with colleagues later.
Systems reasoning experience
The course contains 173 cases to solve,
and each case contains up to a dozen questions. The answers to these questions will be checked and correct answers given with clarifications. So in the course you will not only read how to think systematically,
but also try this thinking on educational tasks.
Ability to think about
the same in different situations
Systems thinking is strong because
it is universal: you mastered it once,
and then you can use it in a variety
of projects, regardless specifics of the domain. In what projects is it recommended to use it? If you have mastered it, then you will not have such a question: you will use
it in all projects, and in especially large collective projects, for the good of the case, you will also teach systems thinking to your colleagues.
We recommend our course for those who lack the power of their thinking to cope with the complexity of their projects: all these elusive tangle of products, services, people and equipment, software and their constantly changing environment.
To become systemic, it is not enough just to think a lot, to be logical and erudite.
To become systemic, you need to master a small set of concepts of systems thinking. The course will introduce this set of concepts. The course
is suitable for:
engineers who got a product, service or software that is more difficult to develop than they are able to digest right now;
engineers who have matured to managerial tasks and realized that they lacked knowledge;
managers who need to negotiate with their engineers;
entrepreneurs who need to start a new business;
a wide variety of people who are faced with unusual projects and have difficulty
in formulating them;
interested in the modern version of systems thinking, which has been tested
for operability by system engineers.