Delaware Valley Chapter
Serving Systems Engineering professionals in the 
Southeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Delaware, and Southern New Jersey areas

To Participate:
To volunteer or suggest a speaker / topic for an upcoming meeting, or to volunteer to help on our Board, please contact:

• President Mike Gehringer
• Vice President Walt Sobkiw
• Past President Terry Kling
• Program Chairman Peter Scott

To join as an active member of INCOSE and become part of our Delaware Valley Chapter:
Visit ~ http://www.incose.org

Please contact any of the officers for information about the Chapter or its activities.     

For more information about the International Council on Systems Engineering, visit the INCOSE Central web site.

Delaware Valley Chapter History

April 2000 INSIGHT article by Craig P. Waverka, President, announced our chapter's formation ten years ago - charter received September 1999

In April of 1999, a small group of Systems Engineers convened at the Lockheed Martin facilities in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania for the purposes of forming an INCOSE Chapter for the Delaware Valley region. Spurred on by Nancy Rundlet, the Region IV Director at that time, the Chapter began to slowly take shape over the summer months. Organizational support from L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) Lakehurst, and the Vanguard Group assisted the emerging Chapter with facilities and human resources dedicated to gaining chartered status for the Chapter. In August of 1999, the Delaware Valley Chapter had the required members for chartered status and submitted our By-Laws to National for official recognition. The Chapter received chartered status one month later when the official word from INCOSE President Ken Ptack was received.

Our Chapter's activities, however, were not solely dedicated to achieving chartered status in 1999. The Delaware Valley Chapter conducted several Chapter meetings where diverse topics such as "Measurements for Today's Process-Oriented Organization", Object Modeling, and Issues in Risk Management were discussed. Our Chapter also had several representatives attend the June Brighton Symposium and we eagerly look forward to attending the 2000 Symposium. We then culminated a very successful year by holding our first elections and at our first Chapter meeting of the new year, Craig Waverka, Garry Roedler, Vern Kuykendall, and David Dudziec were sworn in by Nancy Rundlet as President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Secretary respectively.

If the first Chapter meeting for 2000 is any indication for our future, it is a bright one indeed. Our Chapter activities for 2000 kicked off on January 11 at the CoreTech Consulting Group facilities in King of Prussia. The panel topic was "Managing Systems Engineering Tool Selection". Greg Niemann from the Lockheed Martin Engineering Process Improvement Center and Joseph Christiano from the Vanguard Group provided two outstanding presentations and perspectives on the processes their organizations have adopted and the difficulties they have experienced in integrating systems engineering tools in an efficient and timely manner. The audience questions for the panelists were thought-provoking and clearly indicated that this is a topic that all organizations are struggling with today.

Our Chapter plans on following up the successful January meeting with a Requirements Management panel discussion on March 14 at L-3 Communications in Camden, New Jersey. Scheduled panelists include Bruce Evans, Lockheed Martin, and Janice Magill and Tim Tritsch from NAVAIR Lakehurst. This meeting is planned as a topic intro for our first tutorial on Requirements Management tools and process to be held in June.

In May, our Chapter plans on straying from the more traditional Systems Engineering topics into one that directly impacts our everyday lives but in such a way that we may not be that cognizant of its impacts. One of our original members, Julie Longo, from JLA Technical Video Productions, has been actively organizing a "Systems Issues in Broadcast TV and Video Production" panel discussion. We believe that with the advent of High-Definition TV, DVD, and Internet video formats, this topic will generate a lot of interest across the Delaware Valley region.

In addition to offering quality programs and tutorials, our Chapter has been continuously identifying ways to expand our activities beyond the regional level by integrating our activities with those of the INCOSE Central Technical Community through active involvement and reports from various Working Groups. As our membership grows, we fully intend to strengthen our ties through additional activities such as support for select projects.

As our Board of Directors looks back on the last year, we are very pleased with the activity to date. Our Chapter, which started out with fourteen Systems Engineers in the spring, had almost tripled in size by the end of 1999. The rapid increase resulted in the formation of Delaware Valley At-Large Directors for Lockheed Martin, the Vanguard Group, and NAVAIR Lakehurst. We fully expect to have additional growth in 2000 as the word spreads about the quality programs and tutorials our Chapter offers and we know 2000 will be as successful a year as 1999.