Category: Workplace

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Buildings speak. Do we like what they say?

    What do buildings tell us about the organizations that inhabit them?