Systems Engineering
I have 20 years of experience in system engineering:
- building new systems
- streamlining operations
I believe I am particularly skilled at:
- taking chaotic situations and creating order that is sustainable and scalable
- developing an understanding of deeply complex systems and making them run smoother
- troubleshooting enormously complex systems
Skills that I would bring to your team:
- Fixing broken process, leveraging existing but forgotten resources (updating as necessary)
- Reducing time wasted in troubleshooting problems that have already been solved by others in the organization, establishing resources and processes by which a group of engineers can communicate and leverage each others’ experience.
- Slashing time and money wasted by engineers struggling with a system or technology problem only to learn that their colleagues figured that out last month — or last year
- Seeking out personal silos of information and joining them together so that the whole group can exploit the full body of knowledge
- Understanding complex systems for the purposes of expansion or design change
- Explaining systems to others, starting with the purpose, the essence of WHY the system even exists in the first place
- Building information frameworks, typically starting with a wiki, that captures the knowledge and experience of other engineers. If that framework already exists then I will fully leverage it, but I have considerable experience in simply starting from scratch and building one up
- Enabling teams to work smarter
My personal method for the information framework in particular:
- immediate documentation of new processes (e.g. simply start with a short checklist) and then iterate / evolve rapidly
- continual improvement: capture feedback, immediate edits
- rapid process improvement, especially early
- put those procedures and checklists at the user’s fingertips (online, even mobile)
- when something breaks, don’t just fix the current implementation, fix the procedure so that future implementations don’t break; we should never see the same problem twice
- don’t just design the machine, design the machine that makes the machine
I do have experience with extremely rigorous documentation in large bureaucracies (controlled documentation sets, change notices, etc.) but my real skill is in starting with a complete mess and creating order and efficiency out of it.
Basic Project Management skills:
- keeping track of who owes us what, and following up, both internally and externally
- connecting vendors with each other as needed, pushing things along if necessary
- keeping up with todo lists / punchlists, communicated to project partners and executives
- monitoring team communications, spotting possible mis-comprehension, stepping in to get clarification
- watching out for future choke points (i.e. critical path)
- advertising project status somehow, even via a simple whiteboard outside my office showing sub-task status
For large projects, during the planning stage I look for ways to phase the project, making it easier to digest, providing for intermediate milestones and testing points that build confidence in the process. I look to get an early start on any technology development to buy down / retire risk later in the project.
My system engineering strengths lie in execution and tactics — smart phasing, properly selected test points, parallelizing of work. I do not expect to be the team member developing your strategy or driving business development, rather executing your strategy.
