If we are so good at what we do, why haven’t we mastered [airport delays, responding to natural disasters, blackouts of our power grid]. These are systems problems. … If we don’t have these mastered, what makes us think we will master [future harder challenges]. We must evolve.

– David Long, former president of INCOSE

How does today’s already effective systems engineer, whether full‐time or perhaps secondarily a systems engineer, keep up? How does a junior or mid‐level systems engineer establish the right vector through the three forces – experiences, mentoring, and education & training – in a way that smartly supports their career path? How does someone who manages a group of systems engineers ensure they stay highly effective? How does an executive who is responsible for a business best position their systems engineers to drive that business forward? The magnitude of these challenges is compounded by the speed with which new scientific discoveries, technologies, engineering processes, and business models keep coming, creating new opportunities for innovative people and companies and new threats for those who are slow or clumsy in responding. Rapidly advancing 3‐D printing, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), social networking, data analytics, cybersecurity, virtual reality, driverless cars, fleets of drones – the list is endless. Great opportunities. Great challenges. The final chapter of this book offers specific recommendations on how to guide your own career and the careers of those who work for you so you can thrive in this exhilarating new world. We consider four demographics, in which most readers should be able to find themselves:

• Junior or mid‐level systems engineer seeking self‐improvement.
• Classic engineer, who is secondarily a systems engineer, seeking to improve.
• Organizational manager of a group of systems engineers seeking to advance that group’s effectiveness.
• Executive in an organization that is seeking to improve how systems engineers are hired, developed, and deployed.

LOOKING AHEAD

In November 2017, Mary Miller, who was the acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at that time, gave an inspiring talk on the future of US defense systems [1]. She spoke of the three offset strategies that have enabled US technological superiority since World War II. The First Offset Strategy in the 1950s relied on nuclear deterrence to offset conventional numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact. The Second Offset Strategy in the 1970s relied on “precision‐guided munitions to deter both conventional and unconventional aggression from Soviet Forces.” The Third Offset Strategy, active now, responds to today’s far more diverse threats to US technological dominance. It will strengthen conventional deterrence by:

1. Leveraging autonomy and artificial intelligence to get inside an adversary’s decision cycle.
2. Greatly expanding manned–unmanned combat to extend the US attack surface.
3. Reamplifying US guided‐munitions advantage with raid‐breaking capabilities.
4. Creating new mass by disaggregating complex systems to deliver combined effects.
5. Developing inside‐out and over‐under capabilities to leverage dispersal, sanctuaries, and speed.
6. Developing new forms of distributed maneuver by combining kinetic weapons, electronic warfare, and cyber weapons.

To support the Third Offset Strategy, the DoD is focusing research and development efforts in the 14 areas shown in Table 10.1. Further, DoD sees systems changing as shown in Table 10.2. The magnitude of these changes is daunting.

In 2017, Ken Hoyme wrote a short article on Future Directions in Healthcare Systems Engineering [2] in which he cited three trends in healthcare systems that will push how their systems engineering is performed:

• From few data to a flood: There is an explosion in systems that allow for frequent patient monitoring; automation is “being put into play to manage this massive increase.”
• Increased use of closed‐loop systems: Medical decisions will be made by systems without humans in the loop, based on the flood of data being collected and on sophisticated algorithms that analyze that data, in much the same way advances are being made in driverless cars.
• Large‐scale, closed‐loop control system: New therapies are emerging, ranging from additional pharmacological techniques, biologics, electrical stimulation, implantable pumps, and other options. The physician will operate more as a “plant operator”: setting goals, monitoring alerts, and responding to patient outliers. The patient is the “plant,” who is using a variety of closed‐loop systems.

To support these trends, Hoyme argued that systems engineers need to be able to better characterize the emergent safety properties of closed‐loop systems and be assured that a clinician can be brought into the control loop when needed. Other emergent properties such as security and reliability need to be better understood, as well as techniques to manage the complexity of integrating such systems from different manufacturers relying on different technologies and standards.

Here we have only looked briefly at two business sectors undergoing radical change – defense and healthcare – but virtually every business sector faces similar upheaval. In a world changing this rapidly, systems engineers who deliver the six values explored in Chapter 2, including keeping the system vision and managing emergence in both the project and the system, are sorely challenged to keep up. One key step in maintaining pace is by periodically retailoring two of the systems engineering proficiency areas: SYSTEM’S DOMAIN & OPERATIONAL CONTEXT and SYSTEMS ENGINEERING DISCIPLINE.

For SYSTEM’S DOMAIN & OPERATIONAL CONTEXT, that tailoring will change over time. RELEVANT TECHNOLOGIES, RELEVANT DISCIPLINES & SPECIALTIES, and SYSTEMS CHARACTERISTICS must reflect emerging trends in the systems being constructed. The specific tailoring will depend on the business sector, but virtually every business sector is seeing widespread upheaval because of massive data growth, cybersecurity demands, additive manufacturing, and machine learning, among others.

Similarly, the SYSTEMS ENGINEERING TRENDS category in the SYSTEMS ENGINEERING DISCIPLINE proficiency area is intended to be tailored. Table 4.7 showed several trends, such as AGILE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, that affect how systems are developed, not just how the developed systems operate and behave.

In 2014, INCOSE published its future vision for systems engineering [3], which included seven predictions for how systems engineering would change:

1. Relevant to a broad range of application domains, well beyond its traditional roots in aerospace and defense, to meet society’s growing quest for sustainable system solutions to providing fundamental needs in the globally competitive environment.
2. Applied more widely to assessments of sociophysical systems in support of policy decisions and other forms of remediation.
3. Comprehensively integrating multiple market, social, and environmental stakeholder demands against “end‐to‐end” lifecycle considerations and long‐term risks.
4. A key integrating role to support collaboration that spans diverse organizational and regional boundaries and a broad range of disciplines.
5. Supported by a more encompassing foundation of theory and sophisticated model‐based methods and tools allowing a better understanding of increasingly complex systems and decisions in the face of uncertainty.
6. Enhanced by an educational infrastructure that stresses systems thinking and system analysis at all learning phases.
7. Practiced by a growing cadre of professionals who possess not only technical acumen in their domain of application but who also have mastery of the next generation of tools and methods necessary for the systems and integration challenges of the times.

In order to remain effective, systems engineers must prepare for this world – in fact, they should help shape the way this world emerges. The businesses in which they work must enable their systems engineers.

Jon Wade, who has had a distinguished career in commercial industry as well as in academia and is now the chief technology officer for the DoD‐sponsored Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), was one of the authors of the INCOSE future vision. During his interview with us, he offered the following thoughts on the future of systems engineering:

The places where projects were less than successful were in areas where they did not take into account the complexity of the situation, they did not take into account the human aspects…and there will still be places that don’t do that very well, and they won’t be very successful, and there will be places that do that very well, and they will be very successful. If you look at organizations that work in the information space – the Googles – they are already there. They determine [whether] they want to change their algorithm, they make a change, they [run] experiments, they implement it, they put it out there, they look at results, and based on that they make their determinations. They are agile. They understand it is a complex system. They realize that they cannot understand and predict without experimentation.

Wade went on to say that there will always be exceptions to the predicted paradigm shift, but he said that for the vast majority of systems and companies, rapid experimentation and revision will become dominant.

HOW A JUNIOR OR MID‐LEVEL SYSTEMS ENGINEER CAN THRIVE

As a junior or mid‐level systems engineer, you probably started working professionally as a classic engineer. Over time, you took on assignments with increasing systems engineering activities. At some point, you were recast as a systems engineer (perhaps with a different position title). Now you want to advance your career as expeditiously as possible. Table 10.3 provides six sets of recommendations.

HOW A CLASSIC ENGINEER, WHO IS SECONDARILY A SYSTEMS ENGINEER, CAN THRIVE

As pointed out in Chapter 9, the top‐level framework for career advancement described in Atlas is really not unique to systems engineers. The types of recommendations for a classic engineer who is secondarily a systems engineer are the same as for junior and mid‐level systems engineers. The detailed recommendations, found in Table 10.4, differ slightly to reflect the fact that you are closer to classic engineer on the continuum between classic and systems engineers.

HOW A MANAGER OF SYSTEMS ENGINEERS CAN THRIVE

The manager of a group of systems engineers usually operates within a matrix structure; i.e. the manager is responsible for having a team of people with the right proficiencies and other qualifications (ability to travel extensively, familiarity with a particular customer, government security clearance, etc.) to deliver value to projects managed by others. Although particular authority and responsibilities of a manager vary, it is common for them to be responsible for:

1. Assigning members of the group to projects, usually in consultation with the project manager. The duration of assignments can vary from a few days to several years.
2. Periodic performance reviews of group members, leading to adjustments in pay, bonuses, promotions, and other benefits.
3. Adding and removing members of the group, usually coordinated with the human resources department, the manager’s supervisor, and perhaps others within the organization.
4. Education and training of group members so they stay current with the organization’s emerging needs and can fulfill the assignments given to them by project managers.
5. Personally mentoring members of the group about their careers and the organization and ensuring that mentors are available and supported for all who want them.

As is clear from this list, the manager is in a very powerful position to influence the forces that group members encounter. For example, the manager typically approves or denies a member’s request for internal training, attending conferences, tuition reimbursement for graduate degrees, and transfers to new projects. Table 10.5 offers recommendations for the organizational manager to grow the effectiveness of the group so they can thrive together. These recommendations build on those for individual systems engineers.

HOW AN EXECUTIVE CAN THRIVE

An executive responsible for a business unit or for a functional area, such as engineering, has a broad portfolio. The effectiveness of their systems engineers is only one concern of many. Nevertheless, a team of highly effective systems engineers can have an outsized influence on the business’s success. Executives typically have great sway over the organizational characteristics that are the force multipliers – BUSINESS CULTURE, STRUCTURE, APPRECIATION & UNDERSTANDING OF SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, REWARDS & RECOGNITION, and CAREER GROWTH POTENTIAL. Our recommendations follow, built on those for organizational managers:

1. Rely on organizational managers, project managers, and others who work for you to provide the needed information about the business’ systems engineers.
2. Provide guidance for your systems engineers’ career planning. This could happen in the form of validated PROFILES, exemplar PROFILES, aggregate PROFILES, or information on common career paths. By helping gather this data and communicating it to your systems engineers, you enable them to engage in more intentional planning for their own growth and development.
3. Analyze the organizational characteristics that are force multipliers for systems engineers in your business, drawing on information from your management team. These characteristics are your primary leverage points.
4. Update hiring and other personnel policies, workforce initiatives, and organizational structure to address shortfalls identified in your analysis.
5. Measure progress and adjust.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

This book provides a roadmap for systems engineers to evaluate and manage their careers. It also offers a roadmap for managers who invest in systems engineers, giving them tools to make smart investment decisions. We hope you have enjoyed reading this book as much as we have enjoyed writing it. Helping our colleagues do better at guiding their careers has been our passion for several years.

Systems engineers will play an incredibly important role shaping our future and enabling us to meet the amazing challenges our society and planet face. In the most inspiring efforts, systems engineers are taking on such problems as making electric power grids “smart” and resilient, creating safe autonomous automobiles and deploying them at scale, ensuring everyone has clean water, and defending our world against terrorism. Most systems engineers, however, are helping with more modest but important products, services, and enterprises. They improve traffic flow in a city, build better office building heating/cooling systems, or create better home exercise equipment. Every interesting new or improved system, whether small or large, local or global, needs systems engineers. Some are full time, and some are primarily in other positions and are secondarily doing systems engineering. Some are called systems engineers. Most are called by a variety of other titles. Nevertheless, they all sit at the center of those developments.

It is an exciting time. Opportunities are limitless for those ready to take advantage of rapid‐fire advances in technology and business. To remain effective in such a world, systems engineers need to continually evolve, thoughtfully growing their skills, diversifying their professional portfolios – managing their careers. To remain on top of their game, organizations need to enable that evolution – helping their systems engineers evolve in ways that advance their businesses. The decision whether to thrive is yours. Seize the opportunity.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. 1 Miller, M. (2017). Plenary Address. Ninth Annual Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) Sponsor Research Review, Washington, DC (8 November 2017).
2. 2 Hoyme, K. (2017). Future directions in healthcare systems engineering. Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology 51 (3): 206–207.
3. 3 INCOSE (2014). A world in motion: systems engineering vision 2025. International Council on Systems Engineering. http://www.incose.org/AboutSE/sevision (accessed 24 November 2017).