Applying TQM to systems engineering can reduce costs while simultaneously improving product quality. This guide to proactive systems engineering shows how to develop and optimize a practical approach, while highlighting the pitfalls and potentials involved.

History books tend to describe what happened, but the thoughts, feelings and the day-to-day details are missing. This book fills a little of the gap at least as far as the German Jews who served in the Pioneer Corps in the Second World War are concerned. Moses Jakob Kasser arrived in England in March 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. When the war broke out, he volunteered to serve in the British army and was placed in the 87th Company of the Alien Pioneer Corps together with a number of other Jewish volunteers with a German background. He was ultra-orthodox and his lifetime of service to Anglo Jewry began in a very small way when he became the unofficial Jewish chaplain to his unit. A number of his wartime sermons and some of the artwork they used for services and other commemorations have survived and what he had to say then is as valid today as it was then. This book also contains copies of some of his correspondence in their original English, German, Hebrew and Yiddish providing a treasure trove of material for further research. I did this after long deliberation because in this form the book is an educational resource for many different types of projects. I have only translated some of the letters and draft letters where they clarify some of the situations in the writings. This book also describes a number of incidents including what happened after the official Jewish Chaplain had the audacity to repeat his previous year's Yom Kippur sermon on the following Rosh Hashanah and accidently omitted a page without noticing, while his audience did and that led to some 'fighting in Britain'.

People who can effectively lead the implementation of the information technology, commercial and military systems acquisition and development process within the cost and schedule constraints are scarce. These people are becoming known as systems engineers and the approach they use is systems engineering. However, there is no generally accepted definition of systems engineering, nor is there a generally accepted body of knowledge for systems engineering. Mixing ingredients from systems engineering (Beer, Hall, Jackson, Checkland etc.), management (Taylor, Ford, Drucker, Peters, Hammer and Champy etc.), and Quality (Deming, Juran and Crosby etc.), together with some original thoughts, this book takes you on an exploratory journey, and, by documenting the application of systems thinking to the problem of understanding systems engineering, provides you with a unique perspective for understanding systems engineering and management and how they relate to each other.