I had the pleasure of giving the Rising Leader’s Keynote at the 2018 Pacific Northwest AIAA Technical Symposium. My topic was A Contrarian’s View of Systems Engineering.
I’ve embedded an MP3 of the talk (edited to remove inaudible parts of the Q&A and my most egregious “ums”). If you listen in a podcast player there are chapter marks with my slides as chapter art and a few embedded links to other articles on this site.
contrarian-systems-engineering.mp3
Here was the talk abstract:
There’s remarkable similarity in basic systems engineering fundamentals across a wide range of customers, budgets, and domains. Adam will share some observations on the discipline of systems engineering: at a 20-person company building its first space-flight hardware to the country’s largest defense contractor; from small study contracts to billion-dollar programs; and from a “new space” minimum viable product approach to a customer only interested in 100% Mission Success.
He’ll share some unconventional yet effective takes on these common best practices: requirements management and configuration control, the evolving role and place for collaborative tools like wikis, risk and opportunity management, gated reviews, peer reviews, and trade studies. There’s no magic here, and an interesting idea that worked on one project with one team may be entirely inappropriate in another context, so he hopes to spurs conversation and respectful disagreement in the Q&A.