Engineering Management

Knowledge (Theories, Ideas & Concepts)

Through Professional/Personal Study Gained Through Experience

Philosophies – V Model, Lean, Agile (Dynamic Systems Development Method – DSDM).
Methodologies – Scrum, Kanban, XP, TPS, DSDM, CMMI.
Tools – Sprints, Performance Boards, Tests, Cohort Analysis.
Engineering Development Through-Life Processes revolve around requirements, design, construction/development, integration, testing, debugging, validation/verification, deployment and maintenance.
Engineering Frameworks (Waterfall, V-Model, Incremental, Rational Unified Process) based around gaining customer satisfaction, incremental growth of system definition in parallel with stakeholder commitment, iterative sub-system definition and development (ideally with prototypes), concurrent system definition, development and testing, management and project risk.

New Product Development (NPD) processes that are the cornerstone of most manufacturing companies, that often require a set of well understood requirements up front.
Software Engineering such as the Software Development Process (SDP), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).
Other paradigms and models include Spiral, DevOps, Lean, Agile, Iterative and Incremental Development (IID).
Monitoring the emergence of new Agile Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Together with Responsibilities / Accountabilities

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As one of the Engineering Managers for Cobham, I was responsible for the successful role out and training of key personnel for the Standard Operating Framework for Engineering (SOF-E).
Training and support of Change Agents and Train-the-Trainers in order to establish core knowledge and best practices at individual sites for continuity purposes.

Together With Lessons Learnt

Introducing a new framework into any organisation that still had to meet the demands of day to day operations is a challenge. Conflicting priorities, taking key members of the team out of commission for periods of time and scheduling it all into small windows of opportunity needed to be addressed through careful pre-planning and negotiations.
- ·Rather than teach using theoretical examples, it proved very successful to use current site examples to think through using the new framework. This allowed the practices to have real world value that could be immediately applied and implemented as soon as staff got back to their desks.

As with any change programme, how do you maintain the knowledge and working practices after the core team have left the site. This was achieved using a number of Change Agents that were given additional training together with reach-back support to the core team.

Together with Any 'So What' Statements or Insights

Successful implementation of the framework at a number of US and UK sites. One should not under-estimate the difference between US and UK business cultures, and each implementation was carefully tailored during the implementation process for maximum value and benefits.
One particular problem in manufacturing necessitated the establishment of a ‘Tiger Team’ where the benefits of local and core team successfully worked together in parallel to the introduction of the framework to deliver a successful outcome.

In one instance, I decided to leave one of the most experienced team member behind after the implementation for additional one on one support. The team member quickly added value and became an integral part of the site team, helping to resolve particular difficult issues.