CEO PERSPECTIVE

Business-Driven PLE: Neutralizing an Unintentional Complexity. Part 2 of 2

In part 1 of this series, I described a business risk that is often lurking within the engineering department of companies that design, manufacture, and deploy complex products and systems. This risk can cost businesses millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars for a single incident. Some businesses continue to live with this risk because it goes unnoticed by executive leadership. For Part 2, I’ll elaborate on the promising new trend of business-driven product line engineering (PLE) that is now enabling executives to illuminate and neutralize this risk.

The source of this risk is an unintentional and self-inflicted complexity, over and above the complexity inherent in the products being engineered. When left unaddressed, this significant complexity leads to critical errors, omissions, and lost opportunities. It consumes engineering teams with low-value, mundane, replicative work that deprives them of the majority of their time and energy, which would be better spent on high-value innovative work that eliminates the risk and advances product and business objectives.

Business-driven PLE uses business organizational management to characterize the problem and the solution in terms of the optimal use of company resources — human, physical, electronic, digital — to eliminate error prone communication channels. I’ll use three organizational structures to illustrate this; two longstanding conventional structures that exhibit the high-risk problem and the modern Feature-based PLE organizational structure that provides the strategic solution.

The figure below shows a conventional product-centric organizational structure for engineering a product line. The solid vertical lines show that each product in a product line is the primary organization structure and each has its own dedicated team, including team members for each of the engineering disciplines shown with horizontal dashed lines, such as requirements, design models, implementations (mechanical, electrical, software), tests, etc. The figure is overlaid with the inter-product-team communication channels required to engineer the overall product line, which are proportional to N-squared (for N products) times M disciplines. As illustrated with fire and lightening, these are the intricate, high bandwidth, interpersonal communications that are responsible for the inordinate business risks from errors, omissions, and lost opportunities.

The figure below shows a conventional discipline-centric organizational structure for engineering the same product line. Here, the solid horizontal lines show that each discipline in a product line is the primary organization structure, each with its own dedicated team that is responsible for producing the product-specific assets for all of the products illustrated with the dashed vertical lines.

The figure is overlaid with the inter-discipline-team communication overhead required to engineer the overall product line, which is proportional to M-squared (for M disciplines) times N products. Also illustrated here with fire and lightening, are the intricate, high bandwidth, error prone, interpersonal communications that are similarly responsible for the inordinate business risks.

The final figure below shows the modern Feature-based PLE organizational structure that eliminates the unintentional communication complexity and the inordinate risks associated with the conventional approaches described above. The Feature-based PLE Factory box on the left provides a digital engineering model called a Feature Catalog that all of the engineers in all of the disciplines refer to for the single authoritative source of truth about the product line variation, rather than the ad hoc and error prone vertical interpersonal communication channels shown in the previous figures. The PLE Factory is capable of automatically configuring the engineering assets from all of the disciplines for all of the products in the product line, rather than the ad hoc and error prone horizontal communication channels shown in the previous figures.

The digital engineering capabilities of the Feature-based PLE Factory enable an ideal organizational structure that businesses can leverage to optimize the effectiveness, efficiency, and precision of the human, physical, electronic, and digital company resources. It enables the business to drive out the inordinate risks embodied in the old conventional approaches.

BigLever is the longstanding leader in Feature-based PLE. Our tools and methods are widely used in complex engineering organizations across aeronautics, defense, automotive, and more. INCOSE and ISO now provide Feature-based PLE guidance and standards to help organizations with their transition and steady state operation, in order to gain the dramatic benefits and risk reduction.

With business-driven PLE, business leaders are preemptively asking their engineering leaders, “What is our PLE strategy?”. Making the move to Feature-based PLE enables business leaders to contemplate the question, “What if our engineers could do their normal day’s work before lunch; what would we have them do in the afternoon?”. There are many answers to this question, all of them good.

Sincerely,
Dr. Charles Krueger
BigLever Software CEO