Staying relevant in Systems Engineering is and has always been a never-ending pressure on Systems Engineers. Borrowing some useful imagery from Stephen Covey’s well known book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the 7th habit, ‘sharpening the saw’ is all about keeping our engineering and career skills [useful, relevant, sharp, potent, beneficial] and keeping the engineer from becoming [obsolete, useless, dated].

Because Engineers initially invest so much effort into becoming skillful Systems Engineers, there is a natural tendency afterward to ease, relax and enjoy the use of those hard-won skills. This complacency can be the first step toward obsolescence. Fortunately, within the broad Systems Engineering skill set there are some acquired skills that are long-term, that constitute a core of personal knowledge that becomes exercised and enriched through professional use. Systems Thinking, the end-to-end Engineering Process, and Engineering Management evolve at a slower pace and can be classified into this safer category of skill set: once mastered, it’s easier to maintain mastery. These are the skills that can be made sharp by polishing a little rust off the saw.

Then there is everything else. Those needed Systems Engineering skill sets that have to be adaptive, change rapidly, and require constant updating by the practitioner due to their dependencies on automated design, new technology, new technology methods, new design methods, and the ever-changing Engineering Book of Knowledge (BoK). For these skill sets, you can’t just sharpen the old saw… you need to get a new saw blade.

The growing complexity of systems continues to require the use of new development methods to keep costs, time and quality under control. Traditional, document-centric and test-based approaches are no longer compatible with multi-disciplinary and distributed system engineering. Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is a good approach to this complexity, using a model-centric, frontloaded engineering method. MBSE has grown in use and applicability to the point that every Systems Engineer needs to possess an MBSE skill within their foundational skill set. It is time to move MBSE from Chapter 9 of the INCOSE SE Handbook into its very own chapter that establishes MBSE as part of a serial, comprehensive approach to Systems Design. Modeling has been viewed as a cross-cutting engineering method that could be optional. But more and more, it has shown the need to be performed as one of the serial, technical processes in the Systems Engineering workflow. This will require a new saw blade, not a sharpening of an old saw.

There are many other new areas impacting Systems Engineering that represent more ‘new saw blades’:

In a recent search of systems engineering trends and futures, I happened upon 9 future trends in 2019 that are already reality in 2020; the global cloud architecture is moving so rapidly, it makes me wonder who, if anyone is engineering it as a system?

Look at these trending areas highlighted by O’Reily’s Radar Blog: 9 trends to watch in systems engineering and operations, and ask if just sharpening your saw is all you need to do to respond to the impact of the new trends in systems. If your job or business relies on systems engineering and operations, be sure to keep an eye on the following trends in the months ahead.

(You know you are becoming obsolete when you don’t even recognize the names of the stuff you don’t know about….)

1. AIOps

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) will allow for improved software delivery pipelines. This practice uses machine learning in order to make sense of data and keep engineers informed about both patterns and problems so they can address them swiftly. Rather than replace current approaches, however, the goal of AIOps is to enhance these processes by consolidating, automating, and updating them. A related innovation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), presents options for task automation and is expected to see rapid and substantial growth as well.

2. Knative vs. AWS Lambda vs. Microsoft Azure Functions vs. Google Cloud

The serverless craze is in full swing and shows no signs of stopping. The technology has grown rapidly, and Gartner reports that by 2020, more than 20% of global enterprises will be deploying serverless services. Knative is an open source joint venture of Google, Red Hat, Pivotal, SAP, and IBM—and has the potential to unify the serverless world. Possibly the reason Google is betting on two different platforms for the Cloud

3. Cloud-native infrastructure

Another fast-growing trend, cloud-native applications in production have seen a huge spike in growth. This development is a clear shift from merely doing business in the cloud to creating cloud-native applications. It puts an emphasis on systems design advantages using cloud-based infrastructure.

4. Security

Automating security and baking security controls into the software development process is now critical. With the established GDPR regulations that necessitate the notification of a security breach within 72 hours. DevOps and security practices are becoming intertwined not only in process, but also into the culture.

5. Service mesh

The movement from monolith to microservices is here, and service meshes will be a key component in fast-tracking the transition. A service mesh can best be described as a dedicated layer of infrastructure that enables rapid, secure, and dependable communication.

6. DevOps!!

Need more be said? Teams and departments will continue to merge across organizations, as both data management and security requirements demand cross-functional processes and the lines between traditional role definitions blur. New categories of engineers and job descriptions not around even three years ago will emerge.

7. Kubernetes

Does anyone know what a Kubernete is? OK, good, I‘m not alone…The current industry standard for container orchestration, Kubernetes will continue to grow as more organizations start to implement their own Kube-based infrastructure or letting their cloud vendor manage their complexity through a hosted solution. An O’Reilly survey found that less than 40% of respondents have implemented Kubernetes, suggesting that there is still a lot of hype, but it will change. If you haven’t worked with Kubernetes yet, you probably will soon.

8. Distributed tracing

Distributed tracing, a system tool for monitoring and debugging microservices applications, is poised to become a critical trend going forward. The prevalence of heterogeneous distributed systems made it more difficult to put distributed tracing into practice, but service meshes have come to the rescue, making communication between services easier to do, so distributed tracing will be more easily implemented.

9. Containers

According to a 2018 survey of 576 IT leaders, 44% were planning to replace at least a portion of their virtual machines inside containers. There are a few reasons for this switch—namely, C-suite executives’ ever-increasing dissatisfaction with VM licensing fees. In addition to a major infrastructure change, the move to containers also necessitates the adoption of both DevOps processes and culture, affecting the makeup of IT departments.

As daunting as the learning curve may be for practicing engineers, there is reason to be optimistic that the SE community will rise to these individual challenges. The INCOSE 2025 vision identifies and maps out a plan and addresses the challenges of adapting the engineering workforce to the changing systems environment. Those of us that need to sharpen the saw or get a new saw blade DO have these benefits of INCOSE’s body of information and training services.

A little research on the internet always turns up SE on a range of lists that place System Engineers always somewhere within the top 10 of the survey lists of the college degrees most likely to get a job, the college degree affording the highest paying job. During a recent 2019 presentation, Dr. John McCarthy, University of Maryland, shared that the state of graduate education in Systems Engineering is healthy and well and partially due to the fact that Systems Engineering ranked 2nd nationally in the average starting salary for engineering disciplines behind #1 computer engineering.

New engineers, freshly educated and ready to start work have the advantage of being in an up to date state. Newly certified engineers have shown extra effort to achieve INCOSE certification in the field. We celebrate their achievements and share their pride in their personal achievements. And we are going to pause to celebrate these achievements and recognize contributions this year at our Annual Awards Celebration Event on December 16th. I hope you will join us.

These individual accomplishments are important milestones in maintaining the excellence and viability of the systems engineering community.

When do you ‘Sharpen the Saw’? And when do you need to ‘Buy a New Saw’?