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Large astronomical instruments are often built by consortia of research institutes and universities. The different locations of the various teams, the common interests and shared responsibilities of the partner organizations, and the science driven approach of these projects bring unique challenges to conduct systems engineering efficiently. In this paper we report our positive experience within the METIS consortium that is building one of the three first-generation instruments for the ESO ELT. We developed a novel and fully collaborative systems engineering approach that decentralizes the responsibilities across discipline experts and subsystem providers using a webbased software tool to engineer requirements and interfaces. We discuss the problems that forced us to develop this new approach, describe the new processes and tools, and discuss the benefits, risks, and lessons learned.
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