This work looks at the relationship between systems engineering and project success industry lead in aerospace, agriculture, defense & security, energy and related areas. The projects included both commercial-focused and government-focused efforts. Differences were found in both the overall risk levels and the measures of success for the two groups. In addition, government-focused projects showed a notably larger number of significant relationships between system engineering processes and project success than the commercial-focused projects. The research notes that further investigation is warranted, in particular looking at individual industry sectors, exploring the impact of team dispersion, and developing a better understanding of interrelationships between the systems engineering processes. This type of analysis will help further our understanding of both the art and science of systems engineering.