Many of the key products and services used by modern societies are the result of large-scale engineering projects. Despite decades of theoretical and practical work in the art of systems engineering and project management, project execution results remain somewhat inconsistent, in the sense that many projects fail to produce a product that meets the original specifications, and many more projects achieve some measure of technical success only after taking significantly more time and/or money than originally expected. One source of such failures is the occurrence of unplanned and adverse dynamic behavior in the resulting system. This paper summarizes research being conducted to look at the potential of design-phase actions that centralize control of the eventual system's dynamic behavior as a potential solution to some instances of this problem. This approach could lead to increased chances of success on future major system development projects, through a new method for instituting better control of the dynamic behavior of such a system.