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Lessons Learned from Mentoring Modeling
The Wasatch chapter of INCOSE met with systems engineering students at the University of Utah on September 8, 2022. It was a pleasure to share some our knowledge with the students. Judging by the quality and quantity of their questions, the students also got a lot out of the event. Four of us gave presentations.…
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Working with the Worlds of the Workplace
Systems engineers encounter many different worlds within the workplace: product design, management, sales, testing, manufacturing, service and human resources. If we understand the structure and values of each of these worlds, we can work more effectively with the people that inhabit them. This post was inspired by ideas presented in the book The Dawn of…
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Schedules are Models
Schedules are models. We can use them to model various ways we might organize a project. We can then make a schedule that best meets our needs BEFORE we start executing the project. Two categories of models In this post I find it useful to make a distinction between two categories of models: scientific models…
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Parkinson’s Law for Schedules
Parkinson’s Law states that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” To plan the development of a product, we create a schedule. This schedule is a model of how we hope to proceed with the project. We use it to determine what we need to do, the best order in…
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Daily Status Meetings
In my organization, these were called Execution Control Meetings. Organizations that claim to be using an Agile process will usually call them stand-up meetings or scrums. They are intended to provide a formal way for a small team to communicate with each other about the status of their project. In theory… The purpose of a…
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Product Development Lessons from a Model Car Kit
When I was a child, I loved to buy model car kits and put them together. Perhaps this hobby helped prepare me for a career in systems engineering! Putting together model cars: A thought experiment Imagine that your manager gives you two identical model car kits of a 1964 1/2 Mustang Convertible (pictured below) and…
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Why is my project late?
Anyone who has ever worked on a product development project has asked this question. And has come up with many, many causes! A systems engineer might collect and categorize all these causes in a fishbone diagram. I created the following diagram based on my experience developing medical devices: Once we have made a fishbone diagram,…
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Buildings speak. Do we like what they say?
What do buildings tell us about the organizations that inhabit them?