Michael Brown, SkillsNET Government, Ltd
Darrel Sandall, SkillsNET Government, Ltd
John Henderson, SkillsNET Government, Ltd
Acquisition of complex systems and families of systems require the inclusion of the three major elements of those systems: hardware, software, and human operators and maintainers. These three elements have significant effect on cost, schedule, and system performance and must be considered throughout the systems engineering process, the systems acquisition, and the human readiness process. Historically, only hardware and software have been considered. This approach has lead to systems that are technically risky they are unusable by the human operators and maintainers, cost prohibitive over the life of the system, as total workforce requirements were not examined as part of the acquisition, and are poorly integrated since they do not allow complete realization of the operational capability potential of a fully-integrated system.