Evaluating the complexity of an engineered system is challenging for any organization, even more so when operating in a System‐of‐Systems (SoS) context. Here, we analyze one particular decision support tool as an illustratory case study. This tool has been used for several years by Thales Group to evaluate system complexity across a variety of industrial engineering projects. The case study is informed by analysis of semistructured interviews with systems engineering experts within the Thales Group. This analysis reveals a number of positive and negative aspects of (i) the tool itself and (ii) the way in which the tool is embedded operationally within the wider organization. While the first set of issues may be solved by making improvements to the tool itself, informed by further comparative analysis and growing literature on complexity evaluation, the second “embedding challenge” is distinct, seemingly receiving less attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus on addressing this embedding challenge, by introducing a complexity evaluation framework, designed according to a set of principles derived from the case study analysis; namely that any effective complexity evaluation activity should feature collaborative effort toward building an evaluation informed by a shared understanding of contextually relevant complexity factors, iterative (re‐)evaluation over the course of a project, and progressive refinement of the complexity evaluation tools and processes themselves through linking project evaluations to project outcomes via a wider organizational learning cycle. The paper concludes by considering next steps including the challenge of assuring that such a framework is being implemented effectively.

中文翻译：

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评估工程系统的复杂性：一个基于用户案例研究的框架

对于任何组织而言，评估工程系统的复杂性都具有挑战性，在系统级（SoS）上下文中操作时更是如此。在这里，我们将分析一个特定的决策支持工具，作为一个案例研究。Thales Group已使用该工具几年，以评估各种工业工程项目中的系统复杂性。该案例研究是通过与Thales集团内的系统工程专家进行的半结构化访谈分析得出的。该分析揭示了（i）工具本身以及（ii）工具在更广泛的组织内的操作嵌入方式的许多正面和负面方面。虽然可以通过对工具本身进行改进来解决第一组问题，但可以通过进一步的比较分析和有关复杂性评估的文献不断增加，第二个“嵌入挑战”是截然不同的，似乎在文献中受到的关注较少。在本文中，我们重点介绍了复杂性评估，以解决这一嵌入挑战框架，是根据从案例研究分析中得出的一组原则设计的；也就是说，任何有效的复杂性评估活动都应以协作努力为特征，以建立对上下文相关的复杂性因素的共同理解为基础的评估，在项目过程中进行迭代（重新）评估，并逐步完善复杂性评估工具和流程本身通过更广泛的组织学习周期将项目评估与项目成果联系起来。本文最后通过考虑下一步工作，包括确保有效实施这种框架所面临的挑战。