Demystifying Global Engineering - The right concoction is key to cutting the flab...
Engineering of complex systems involve three major elements - expertise, engineering scale and program management. “Engineering expertise” seeds innovation (through experience and product knowledge), “engineering scale” accomplishes the complex engineering work in a systematic/standardized manner and “program management” ensures that all pieces of the puzzle come together as planned. In the current challenges of ever increasing customer expectations for faster, better and cheaper products (and systems) combined with graying engineering workforces and demographic challenges, Global Engineering holds the key. Smarter organizations are benefiting from the “compelling value” global engineering can offer rather than worrying about replicating their own engineering organizations elsewhere on the globe. “Demystifying” global engineering is key for appreciating and benefiting from leaner engineering organization models thriving innovation and agility.
Global Engineering involves breaking up of complex engineering programs into granular levels, enabling globally distributed teams to innovate at varying degrees. For optimum (lean) results it is essential to have a balanced mix of experts, engineers and program managers as each of these resources has its own cost and availability constraints. Having more proportion of experts in a team –as in most of customer’s established engineering organizations- is certainly not a “must to have”. Experts offering higher levels of innovation and program directions are definitely required but, such higher level competencies are not mandatory for the entire team. If the majority of the engineers are capable of contributing at granular levels of innovation and have the ability and motivation to execute in a systematic and standardized manner (leveraging their experience and competencies), the resulting engineering organization can be much more leaner, innovative and agile.
Expertise is not about doing the same things again and again. Experts should be leveraged for higher level innovations and for establishing program level directions. Innovative frameworks should be leveraged for forming a winning combination of (i) scarcely available systems engineering experts, (ii) abundant supply of engineers and (iii) capable program managers for lean global engineering operations. A right concoction is key for cutting the flab…
