As is often the case, it is the neglect of fundamental principles that is at the root of poor performance. Sports coaches often stress the return to fundamentals—the “blocking and tackling”—as the key to improving team performance. This is a recognition of the powerful effect that adherence to sound fundamental …

Our quest to transition to model-based systems engineering – and the larger transformation of the development lifecycle to digital engineering – centers on moving from relatively low-fidelity documents to higher fidelity, richer representations. In doing so, we can move from the ambiguity of documents to digital clarity, allowing us to …

Ever since I’ve been an engineer, technical designers have been dealing with handoff issues. What do I mean by handoff issues? In track and field, when a relay runner hands the baton to another runner in the exchange zone, it can happen that a runner bobbles the handoff. This can …

Complexity poses a greater and greater challenge for the system designer/problem solver. The classic approach to problem analysis and solution calls for the problem and its solutions to be broken apart into their constituent parts until those parts are simple enough to be clearly understood. From there, the parts—whether of …