In Stay Sharp Episode 141, Finlay’s Five Firsts – a Field Guide to Digital Engineering Adoption, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott sit down with a digital engineering (DE) implementation veteran, Chris Finlay, the Vice President of Engineering Innovation at SAIC. Chris shares his lessons learned from the 20 years he’s spent driving the adoption of DE across the defense industry. As Jonathan notes, while Chris’s stories are about his work with systems engineering and MBSE, his insights apply more broadly, especially his experience with the people side of the transformation journey.
Chris Finlay, Vice President of Engineering Innovation, SAIC
A DE Origin Story
Chris recounts two key projects that directed the course of his DE career. The first was working on a large program for the US Navy. He was the lead systems engineer taking a clean-sheet approach to requirements for a launching system, and his team found a tool to “accelerate the mundane or the toil, which was creating a flow diagram in a Visio tool or on a whiteboard,” he says. The tool let them create the functional flows and then export all the details in the diagram to an Excel sheet, which meant data entry and organization were done automatically for lots of specs and requirements for multiple weapons. He admits to pushing the limits of Microsoft Office at the time, but says, “We were able to create what in hindsight may have been one of the very first primitive digital threads.”
If Chris’s first key project was accidental DE, the second was more intentional. A few years later, he led a team of four tasked with reverse engineering a large combat system that was based on “thousands and thousands of pages of spec.” At that point, MBSE existed in a primitive form, and his team took a use-case method and simply started modeling, building up the large model from lots of small ones. “At the end of the day,” he says, “we had this whole model that was identifying gaps and issues with the system that may or may not have been real, but they were definitely real gaps in the specifications. And we had this authoritative source of truth, which I now call the crystal ball of how the system works.”
The success of their project led to Chris’s bosses wanting him to “upskill” other people working on different programs at the company, which was a challenge because of the people. “In hindsight, it was what the chief engineer called a character-building experience,” he says. “Nine times out of 10, you would get a ‘over my dead body’ look.” Not that Chris blames anyone who wasn’t interested in being force-fed new processes, because they had their own directives and perspectives. He realized that to succeed, you have to meet people where they are—to be empathetic and understand what they’re risking.
Five Rules and a Few Challenges
While that isn’t one of Chris’s Five Firsts, it’s another valuable tip for anyone embarking on a digital transformation project. His other “rules of the road” were, he says, “what guided me through, because it wasn’t like this program was done and then the world transformed. It was almost like every program, you had to go in and fight tooth and nail for every inch you got.”
His first two guidelines concern what DE will and won’t do: it’ll enforce good systems engineering and good practices, and it will quickly expose bad ones. “That’s because of the nature of the forced rigor, the connected data. It really promotes a fail fast or fail faster approach.” The next points out that while you have connected data, you shouldn’t go crazy and try to link everything to everything else, just because you can—because can do doesn’t mean need to do or should do. You also need to recognize you’ve got to train the people you have for the new DE world, because you can’t hire your way out of the problem when students aren’t coming out of college with the degree or the capabilities. And lastly, if you’re not already on your way to your DE transformation you’re probably behind.
Chris urges organizations to understand that more than a technological transformation, this is a cultural transformation, and the point is to affect behavioral change. “That’s really what cultural transformation is. It’s changing the behavior, changing the mindset,” he adds.
Learn More About Digital Engineering Transformation
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what Chris says trips many teams up, his rule of thumb for when you should link data sources, why he says you should “putt from someone else’s drive,” why celebrating success is so important, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 141: Finlay’s Five Firsts – a Field Guide to Digital Engineering Adoption and join us each week for a new podcast.
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