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