by Pat Sweet | Sep 19, 2014 | Article, Leadership, Project Management, Systems Engineering
As engineers, we love to build things. Big things. Complicated things. New things. And, if we’re honest, we’re pretty good at it, aren’t we? There’s just one little problem – does anyone actually want what we’ve built? Maybe yes,...
by Pat Sweet | Aug 2, 2014 | Article, Project Management
In the world of engineering, most of us work in a “project environment”. That is to say, most of our work consists of a series of distinct, unique endeavours to accomplish some specific goal. That could be to design a new product or service, for...
by Pat Sweet | May 14, 2014 | Article, Project Management, Systems Engineering
As much as I hate to admit it, engineers are fallible (Gasp!). I know, I know, we spent years in school learning second order derivatives, every function possible in Excel, and have the Greek alphabet memorized. But still, it happens from time to time that we...
by Pat Sweet | May 1, 2014 | Article, Leadership, Productivity, Project Management, Systems Engineering
Do you work in an environment with high levels of uncertainty? Uncertainty is characterized by high complexity (that is, many players or factors are at work) and high instability (things can change in a moment). If you have both complexity and instability, you have...
by Pat Sweet | Oct 24, 2012 | Article, Project Management, Systems Engineering
Engineering design is something I don’t write about nearly enough. Today, I’m going to buck the trend and cover something I feel is really important: designing with the outside world in mind. In engineering, it’s a common problem to design a...
