-
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…
-
Leading a Design Meeting
TYPES OF DESIGN MEETINGS Working Design Meeting You meet with a group of peers to figure out solutions to design problems. You brainstorm ideas, then discuss back and forth to evaluate and modify them. A really good working design meeting is so intellectually stimulating and so much fun that you often spend way more than…
-
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,…
-
What is a Trade Study?
Trade studies help us make wise decisions A trade study is a procedure that provides a framework for making wise decisions. To make any sort of wise decision you must: Consider the point of view of everyone affected by the decision. Understand what they need and what they want. Determine what is most important to them. In…
-
What is Systems Engineering?
An Engineering Discipline Systems Engineering is a discipline whose practitioners design things that are complex and useful. The complex and useful things that we design are usually manufactured objects such as space probes, aircraft or medical devices. But we can also apply our skills to the design of social systems. To do our work, we…
-
Buildings speak. Do we like what they say?
What do buildings tell us about the organizations that inhabit them?
-
Tulips and Stepping Stones
A careless gardener may place a stepping stone over a tulip bulb hidden dormant in the ground. As the tulip emerges from its bulb the next spring and grows upward toward the light, it encounters the stone. It expends extra energy to grow around the obstacle and eventually emerges, twisted and stunted, from the edge…