Quality Management is one of the six Organizational Project-Enabling Processes described in the INCOSE Handbook v4 (Section 7.5) and in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015.

The overall purpose of the Systems Engineering Quality Management Working Group is to foster the definition, understanding and practice of quality management in the systems engineering profession.

This purpose will be achieved by the establishment of quality management as a cornerstone of professional development that adds value to the systems engineering profession, and engineering in general, through the following initiatives:

• Developing and elaborating systems engineering as a leadership discipline with quality management as a foundational competency,
• Enabling systems engineers to develop and expand the skills to manage process quality and increase profitability,
• Considering the organization as a system, fully integrating the process, the person and the job description, and
• Raising the level of professionalism, corporate and technical influence, job satisfaction and the career path trajectory.

Quality management, as addressed in this working group, is distinct from other aspects of quality such as quality assurance, quality control and acceptable quality levels. Quality management is also distinct from the SE disciplines of verification and validation of systems.

This working group aims to address quality management as a leadership and management discipline, as applied within systems engineering. This follows the approach to quality management described in the works of Deming, Crosby and Juran, but limits the application to the engineering and systems engineering disciplines.

The working group will also address the connections of quality management to other areas of systems engineering, notably systems thinking and organizational leadership.