Brownfield to Greenfield – Understanding the Transition

Speaker: Eric Herzog (SAAB Aeronautics)
Venue: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg

Systems Engineering is, as described in textbooks and standards, a uniform recipe for achieving success in the development of complex systems. In reality, Systems Engineering textbooks do provide us with a number of tools mastering development, and the real challenge is to tailor the usage of the tools to the problem at hand. Consequently, every systems organization will and should have its own approach to systems development broadly falling within the large field of Systems Engineering.

Systems Engineering will also be executed to different standards when continuing developing from a mature system – brownfield development and when starting over from scratch – greenfield development. This presentation discusses the characteristics of brownfield and greenfield development with particular attention to the challenges that arise when an organization transition from brownfield to greenfield development. These challenges are especially difficult to master for organizations developing single systems with very long lifecycles as there will be few people with active experience with the last transition. Moreover, previous experiences may not be wholly representative due to changes in realization technology and architecture.