Musings on Systems Engineering Balancing

Effective systems engineering is a great balancing act – balancing competing stakeholder needs and concerns, balancing technical possibilities and risks, balancing trade-offs between speed of development and exhaustive attention to minute details.  Themes of balance can be found in diverse places in human endeavors; for example:

• Steven Covey writes about the need to balance attention to the urgent with attention to the important in managing your own time
• Work-life balance is an issue for many professionals with demanding jobs
•  Balancing short-term consequences with long-term implications is often a challenge, especially since in so many areas of life and work incentives are focused on short term outcomes

So what contributions can a systems engineer make to improve the ability to balance of their organization and the projects they are assigned to support?  I believe the first, and perhaps most important, contribution a systems engineer can make is by noticing and bringing to the attention of others when choices involve the need for balance.  When we frame a choice in terms of the different interests and concerns which will be affected, decision-makers can consciously choose a course that will provide a balance.  The table below shows a few of the areas where balancing can be helpful, along with some thoughts on the value systems engineers can add.

Balance This	With That	SE Potential Value Add
Communicating technical detail	Communicating the “so what” – insights into what it means to different stakeholders, and what choices they may have as a result	Clarifying needs of different stakeholders for information; providing a bridge between detail and its implications for stakeholders
Optimizing for immediate needs	Providing flexibility to handle future needs	Identifying possible directions in which needs may change in the future; identifying choices in system architecture and design which can increase system flexibility (especially at no or low cost)
Customer-defined requirements	Innovation-based development ”build it and customers will come”)	Providing insight into what difference changes in requirements could make; using agile approaches to get capabilities into the hands of users more quickly
Using readily available technology	Innovating to create new technology	Prototyping systems and products using readily available technology to allow users to gain experience with them, so the economic payoff for investing in new technology becomes much clearer
Quick and low-cost system development	System robustness for supportability over the long term	Advocating agile system architectures, so changes in a system can be made with lower cost and less risk

So the next time that you stop to consider how you can add more value to your organization in your capacity as a systems engineer, think about balance.  How might you be able to help others see the choices they are making in terms of improving the balance between different concerns?

By

Dorothy McKinney

INCOSE Fellow