System Integration

Bringing interdependent components into one working whole — the design act that dissolves the walls between domains.

Integration is what makes a set of good parts into a functioning thing. It is not assembly. Parts designed separately and bolted together inherit every assumption their designers never checked against each other, and the failures appear at the seams, late, where they are most expensive.

This is the face Integrated Delivery wears in the making. The ninth Element dissolves the walls between domains: those who design, those who build, and those who will live with the result work as one body rather than in sequence, with concurrent design instead of a relay of finished handoffs. The reason is blunt — you cannot optimize the pieces and expect the whole to work. Every local optimum bought at a neighbour's expense is a net loss wearing a success story.

Three practices carry it. Cross-functional integration: the disciplines sit together from the beginning, so the trade-offs are made by people who can see all of them. Quality at the handoff: the one who will receive the work writes what makes it acceptable before the work starts, and the successor is treated as the customer. Shared commitments between groups: a Cell commits to a Cell, so no single person carries the weight of a seam and there are no single points of failure.

For a Cell in its first season this is smaller than it sounds. It is making sure the person who will use what you are making has said what good would mean, before you make it; and it is asking, when work crosses from one pair of hands to another, what could stop the next person from being ready. Most of what goes wrong in a season goes wrong there.

Also called: Cross-Functional Integration Stands on: Integrated Delivery · System · Design · Networks of Commitments Opens onto: Cross-Functional Integration · Concurrent design · Conditions of satisfaction · Interface · The look-ahead · Integrated Project Delivery In play: the table · the Room Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Pillar IX table (draft) · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, Element 9 (canon-grade) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System v0, quality at the handoff and commitments between groups (draft) · the seed's Part VII (Fable synthesis, second draft). lionsberg.wiki: System Integration. Open: System Integration under Pillar IX and Cross-Functional Integration under Element 9 are the same practice named twice in two books; neither page points to the other.