By Jorg Largent

Are we being sufficiently deliberate and disciplined in our approach to advocating the systems engineering process? Within the community of systems engineering professionals there is widespread agreement as to the essence and value of the systems engineering process. Our disagreements, while passionate at times, are mostly disagreements of style rather than substance. Outside the community, however, the audience changes — oftentimes skeptical or unsure, not fully appreciative of how the systems engineering process is beneficial to them or to their goals. With this in mind, one consideration is that those within the profession need to tailor their advocacy to helping others by tailoring their advocacy to match the audience. Or, to use a comment from within the Intelligent Transportation and Transit Systems (ITTS) working group in late 2008: “Help SE on the inside translate SE lingo to customer lingo.” Tailoring would then, at least in part, consist of:

1. Translating the lingo and
2. Showing the value of the systems engineering process from the perspective of the listener.

It would appear that there are three general audiences, each with unique needs based on their unique perspectives, needs that will determine the tailoring:

1. The executive,
2. The project leader or program manager, and
3. The implementers.

Using broad terms, these three audiences can be defined as follows:

1. The executive is responsible for the overall health and productivity of the organization. The executive is responsible for ensuring that the organization has the wherewithal to successfully accomplish the projects being pursued by the organization. And while the “profit motive” is different in the commercial world than it is in the non-commercial world, the executive is responsible for returning desired value to the stockholders or stakeholders, as the case may be.
2. The project leader or program manager is responsible for the execution of a given project and is the “designated worrier” for performance, cost, and schedule, although there are times when performance is subordinate to cost and schedule.
3. The implementers can be identified most easily with requirements development, requirements management and the requirements “V.” It is in this arena that the engineers of varying levels of specialization are most fully engaged. However, it should be noted that the term “implementers” is much broader than the focus of engineers and the requirements “V” because the term “implementers” also includes maintainers and operators, to name but two.

By Paul Cudney and John Silvas 

John Thomas, Sr. Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton and candidate for President of INCOSE, shared his views on the value systems engineers (SE) add to large programs. Successful programs excel in three team roles: management, build component, and definition and integration. Leadership exercised by the systems engineer, based on compelling technical mastery, is the key to successful execution of each team. However, technical prowess does not ensure success. The systems engineer has a key responsibility to lead decision makers to successful decisions bounded by schedule and budget. Mr. Thomas offered several vivid examples during his presentation.

By: Jorg Largent

Young students in junior high school provide an interesting laboratory to observe architecting without the bells and whistles of large quantities of money and without the sophistication of complicated and advanced technologies.

• The setting: twenty students attending a one-week “engineering camp” in the summer.
• The challenge: win a contest hurling a Ping-Pong ball the farthest. They had only a few classroom hours to solve the problem — the competition was the next day.
• The task: form teams of two and build a catapult with the materials provided.

The materials provided to each team were paper, sheets of balsa wood, balsa dowels, a mouse trap, and an assortment of rubber bands, plus glue, knives, and saws – supplies such as one might find in a hobby shop, save the mouse trap.

They’re Off! All of the teams, with one exception, were drawn to the mousetrap in their supplies. The mousetraps were not simply “fancy” in terms of their relative mechanical complexity; the bait pad on the mousetrap was a bright yellow, whereas everything else was a drab, beige color. Setting and triggering the mousetrap became a major activity, especially since a mentor was the one who got his finger caught (and he was glad it was not a rattrap). They settled on the mousetrap as the source of the kinetic energy for the ball.

The teams made this architectural decision somewhat independently of the adults and the other teams; their decisions were based on the attributes of resources provided, and their understandings of catapults. The team that was an exception had different under standing of catapults, and chose to use the mousetrap only as a base for a design that used the rubber bands as their energy source – a design somewhat akin to a medieval catapult.