I was recently offered an incredible opportunity to spend a day aboard an operational U.S. Navy ship, meeting the crew and observing their work as they conducted a live fire exercise. The experience blew me away. I came away with new appreciation for our surface forces as well as observations relevant for defense acquisition policy and systems engineering.
A system lexicon is a simple tool which can have a big impact on the success of the system. It aligns terminology among technical teams, the customer, subcontractors, support personnel, and end users. This creates shared understanding and improves consistency. Read on to learn how to implement this powerful tool on your program.
Successful systems are created by engineers who understand and design to the ultimate objectives of the project. When we lose sight of those objectives we start making design decisions based on the wrong criteria and thus create sub-optimal designs. Scope creep, group think, and simple convenience are frequent causes of this type of variation. An effective design assessment tool is a touchstone by which we can evaluate the effectiveness of ongoing design decisions and keep the focus on the optimal solution.
It is our job as systems engineers to create symmetrical hourglasses. We achieve this through customer intimacy, mission understanding, and good engineering practices.
Say you’re standing up a software development team. You really like the agile approach, but your customer didn’t read my previous post about agile contracts. Can you still use agile or are you stuck developing a waterfall-based program plan?
Agile promises to deliver capabilities to the end user faster and more effectively. Government project offices can realize the benefits, but must carefully design their contracts to support the agile approach. A growing body of expertise, lessons learned, and acquisition resources are available to help make it happen.
This article is required reading for anyone who needs to hire, wants to become, or is going to be working with an HSI expert. Understand what the job entails, the key skills required, and how it relates to the rest of the systems engineering effort.
HSI is a natural part of the systems engineering process. It adds minimal up-front cost for significant benefits and cost savings. Optimizing the system for performance and lifecycle cost benefits the customer. Ensuring early consideration of HSI factors reduces the risk of costly rework to the contractor. Delivering a system which is mission effective with reasonable lifecycle costs benefits everyone.
DoD acquisition policy requires Human Systems Integration (HSI). Various human-centered engineering approaches are also gaining traction outside of military projects. But is HSI just a fancier way of saying Human Factors Engineering (HFE)?
Human systems integration (HSI) is a systems engineering function with the goal of optimizing system performance and cost across the entire system lifecycle. It ensures that the human elements of the system are given at least as much consideration as any other component across the entire project. HSI is a relatively new and often misunderstood term. Here are the basics.