Part 1 of 5 for the June edition of "Converging over Coffee"
While chatting with a colleague about some of the challenges we're seeing in engineering projects, he observed that it's becoming normal for a solution to be put forward and often pushed hard, even when it was only a good solution for that particular discipline (say electrical) and will foreseeably cause significant problems for 3 other disciplines.
Was it just to be expeditious? Put it out there and see what happens. That first step was probably expeditious, for one person. Considered as a team, I'm pretty certain the overall path to the final solution was anything but expeditious. Not to mention the drain on emotions from the ensuing pushback, frustration and possibly outrage.
No matter how competent our technical design is, it's only when our systems design game is strong that we will finally be able to creatively problem solve without as much drain on time and emotions.
