The anticipated audience of the H·I·T·S Engineering Training comprises engineers, and managers who have to take into account for making sound decisions. Both groups represent people with wide ranges of qualification, and with varying levels of expertise. This page provides hints how members from both groups may benefit from attending the three Training Modules of the H·I·T·S Engineering Training Curriculum.
For this purpose, a few typical professional profiles are identified characterising engineers and managers. Table 1 provides an overview of the professional profiles considered and a recommendation summary classifying the benefit either as + or ++. Following the theme, “nothing is more practical than a good theory”, the H·I·T·S Engineering Training Curriculum aims for mindset changes as well as for practical recommendations that are directly applicable on the job. A ++ indicates that both aims may be achieved. If the mindset benefits dominate, the + indicates that attending the particular Training Module is anticipated primarily as a professional development measure qualifying for more advanced systems engineering roles and positions.
| Module 1 | Module 2 | Module 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Young Engineers | ++ | ++ | + |
| Experienced Discipline Engineers | ++ | ++ | + |
| Systems Engineers | ++ | ++ | ++ |
| Experienced Systems Engineers | + | ++ | ++ |
| Systems Engineering Managers | ++ | + | ++ |
| Other Managers | ++ | + | ++ |
The sections below subsequently discuss the potential benefits per professional profile. Each section starts with a brief characterisation of the professional profile followed by a discussion of the potential benefits. The potential benefits are described separate for each Training Module. As some of the listed benefits have in share in both, mindset changes and practical advice, no clear classification regarding the two aims is possible. However, the lists always start with the more mindset change oriented benefits and then moving more and more to the practical advice benefits.
List of benefits in the sub-sections will be added.
Usually, young engineers have an academic education in a particular engineering discipline. At university, they may have shown an interest in systems engineering and project management, and may have selected courses specialised on these topics. They are at the beginning of their professional career involved in the development of products and services that demand contributions from multiple engineering disciplines, or in a support function concerned with systems engineering processes. Their employers may expect that they induce fresh academic knowledge into the organisation.
Experienced discipline engineers have gained expertise in their particular engineering disciplines, and more or less knowledge in the application domain of the products and services provided by the enterprise. For good reasons, they are self-convinced about their superior knowledge and experience, and about the importance of all the details mastered by their own engineering discipline. They are well accepted among their peers. They have found their niche in the company at least. If issues arise regarding the products or services they are working on, they may become suspicious about other disciplines, and tend to externalise causes beyond the scope of their own engineering discipline. They may experience it as a tedious and sometimes frustrating task when they have to represent their discipline in a multi-disciplinary context.
Systems engineers have acquired their position either due to appropriate academic specialisation, or by professional promotion. They are convinced about the importance of processes, methods, and sometimes particular tools. They prefer standardisation and generalisation commonly applied by all disciplines within their organisation. In their move for generalisation, they may tend to disregard the specific phenomenological characteristics of particular products and services. They may acknowledge the intricacies of human motivations and behaviours, but distinct hard skills that really matter from soft skills that have to overcome these unnecessary psychological and social issues.
Experienced systems engineers master multi-disciplinary ways of working with a lot of expertise in the application domains of products and services developed within their organisation. They are accepted either as engineering leaders or grey eminences. During their professional life, they have acquired a lot of tacit knowledge about social aspects within engineering teams, and how to apply it successfully. Sometimes they may suffer from immature decisions taken by less experienced engineers unable to conceive the whole, or by distant managers.
Systems engineering managers are experienced engineers. They take leading roles in multi-disciplinary engineering teams. They are convinced of adding value by bringing engineers from different engineering disciplines together. For them, appropriate solutions evolve when several engineering disciplines work together in a concerted way. Sometimes they may be frustrated about the time-consuming planning and reporting demands rather distant to the real issues faced with during system concept generation and system development.
This professional profile comprises managers with the focus more on the enterprise than on particular products and services. They may have limited knowledge of engineering theory and the practice of system concept generation and system development. The majority may have no engineering education at all. They observe the organisation’s operations primarily via key performance indicators. They anticipate system concept generation and system development as tasks driven by sequential milestones. They may not accept the importance of learning as fast as possible in order to be efficient because this would undermine the significance of milestones.