The UK ATC follows an integrated systems engineering approach to develop world class telescope and astronomical instruments. It is the role of Systems Engineering to define and apply the design process through:
Systems Engineers have a high level of technical awareness coupled with strong communication and organisational skills. Until recently the UK ATC shared these roles between the project manager and project scientist but now it has a dedicated Systems Engineering Group with four highly accomplished systems engineers. They are applying a well understood systems engineering process across all current projects.
At the moment the Projects getting most systems engineering input are VISTA, SCUBA 2 and KMOS along with conceptual design studies for potential ELT Instruments. The Group are also leading implementation of organisation-wide Configuration Management Tool using 'Livelink' software.