We’ve come a long way. It’s never been a better time to enter the workforce as a woman/person of color/LGBTQ/etc. Diversity in the workforce and leadership of engineering companies is on the rise, barriers are falling, and the value of diversity is being recognized. And yet, we still have so far to go.
The vast majority of catastrophes are created by a series of factors that line up in just the wrong way, allowing seemingly-small details to add up to a major incident. The Swiss cheese model is a great way to visualize this and is fully compatible with systems thinking. Understanding it will help you design systems which are more resilient to failures, errors, and even security threats.
“A Message to Garcia” is a brief essay on the value of initiative and hard work written by Elbert Hubbard in 1898. It is often assigned in leadership courses, particularly in the military. There are a number of interpretations and potential lessons to be extracted from this story. It’s important that developing leaders find the valuable ideas.
The INCOSE Handbook “Specialty Engineering” section is a hodge-podge of roles and skillsets with varying scope. It does a disservice to many of the aspects, particularly human systems integration (HSI).
The 737 is an excellent airplane with a long history of safe, efficient service. Boeing’s cockpit philosophy of direct pilot control and positive mechanical feedback represents excellent human factors. In the latest generation, the 737 Max, Boeing added a new component to the flight control system which deviated from this philosophy, resulting in two fatal crashes. This is a case study in the failure of human factors engineering and systems engineering.
I was recently offered an incredible opportunity to spend a day aboard an operational U.S. Navy ship, meeting the crew and observing their work as they conducted a live fire exercise. The experience blew me away. I came away with new appreciation for our surface forces as well as observations relevant for defense acquisition policy and systems engineering.
A system lexicon is a simple tool which can have a big impact on the success of the system. It aligns terminology among technical teams, the customer, subcontractors, support personnel, and end users. This creates shared understanding and improves consistency. Read on to learn how to implement this powerful tool on your program.
Successful systems are created by engineers who understand and design to the ultimate objectives of the project. When we lose sight of those objectives we start making design decisions based on the wrong criteria and thus create sub-optimal designs. Scope creep, group think, and simple convenience are frequent causes of this type of variation. An effective design assessment tool is a touchstone by which we can evaluate the effectiveness of ongoing design decisions and keep the focus on the optimal solution.
It is our job as systems engineers to create symmetrical hourglasses. We achieve this through customer intimacy, mission understanding, and good engineering practices.
Say you’re standing up a software development team. You really like the agile approach, but your customer didn’t read my previous post about agile contracts. Can you still use agile or are you stuck developing a waterfall-based program plan?