[jarl-ragnar]

This rang so true. I recently left a large multi-national aerospace company where I and my team had developed local processes that put systems engineering first.

Unfortunately our main contract was developing a component of a larger system being developed by our parent organisation who didn’t have a concept of systems engineering. We tried for years to educate them and I watched aghast as their program costs and schedule continued to spiral out of control.

Basically a bomb burst of engineers all doing what they thought was the right thing but no one owning the system design and saying no to good ideas.

In the words of their chief engineer “its like 10 different black boxes, I don’t know what I’m getting and I don’t know when it’ll be finished!”