Jules van Liefland

Systems Engineering consultant and trainer at Dutch Boosting Group

Additional speakers.

Bart van Luling

Parameters for building SE capability in project teams

Bio:

Jules van Liefland is an ASEP-certified Systems Engineering consultant and trainer at Dutch Boosting Group. Over the past five years, he has worked on SE challenges across energy networks, water management, the built environment and infrastructure. He holds a degree in Complex Systems Engineering from Delft University of Technology and is particularly interested in how Systems Engineers develop capability through learning and practice.Jules van Liefland is an ASEP-certified Systems Engineering consultant and trainer at Dutch Boosting Group. Over the past five years, he has worked on SE challenges across energy networks, water management, the built environment and infrastructure. He holds a degree in Complex Systems Engineering from Delft University of Technology and is particularly interested in how Systems Engineers develop capability through learning and practice.

Abstract:

The INCOSE SE vision 2035 states that the demand for competent and well-trained systems engineers exceeds the available supply. The future calls for well-educated engineers with sound domain and systems competencies. Within SE education, there is a strong focus on educating the individual, and not the team it is a part of. We observe that building individual SE capabilities does not automatically translate to an SE-capable team. Effective Systems Engineering is fundamentally a team capability, and we believe that more focus should be put on educating the team, rather than the individual alone.

Dutch Boosting Group has observed this gap from two sides across Dutch infrastructure: as embedded SE consultants inside project teams, and as a training house whose involvement ends at the classroom door. Individually trained practitioners do not automatically produce an SE-capable team. Individual competence is necessary, though insufficient.

Three candidate parameters

Drawing from field experience, we suggest three factors that distinguish the successfulness of educating interventions at team level.

Continuity of SE presence. The critical question is not who delivers the training, but whether SE expertise remains present in the team after the learning intervention. A team returning to its project without ongoing SE support operates in a fundamentally different environment.

Time and level of entry. When does the intervention land, and at which level? A team trained in isolation (or engaged only when problems are already escalating) frequently faces an organisation pulling in a different direction, producing conflicting SE approaches where there should be one.

Live project relevance. Generic training produces generic understanding. Training built around the team’s live project challenges, following the “I do, we do, you do” principle, produces practitioners who can apply what they have learned.

These are tentative hypotheses rather than definitive conclusions, drawn from practice observation and from a question we hear in almost every training: “This is valuable, but how do we apply it in our project?”

Workshop format

The session is structured in two phases. In the first (40 minutes), we present our hypothesis on building SE capable teams with our candidate parameters supported by Dutch infrastructure cases. Participants then work in subgroups to enrich the hypothesis: which parameters are recognized or challenged, and what can be added from specific application domains? In the second phase (35 minutes), participants build a cross-sector set of parameters in effectively building SE capable teams.

Contribution

This session will contribute to a practitioner-built foundation for more effective SE education in project contexts. Findings during the session will be presented to the SIG education specifically and made available to the INCOSE community afterwards.