In Stay Sharp Episode 148, The Question Every Digital Thread Has to Answer, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott expand on a previous conversation (Stay Sharp Episode 141) with Chris Finlay, the former VP of Engineering Innovation at SAIC and current Digital Systems Engineer Director at Raytheon. This time, they explore the benefits and power of the digital thread through Chris’s experience and real-world use cases.
Chris Finlay, Digital Systems Engineer Director at Raytheon
Recognizing the Digital Thread’s Value
One clear way a digital thread can save time and money, even early in a project, is linking system requirements to elements of your system’s design. Chris describes a recent example of a government customer’s large project and a systems requirement review that ended with a request for requirements traceability. Rather than that request generating days or weeks of manual human effort—as the requestor expected—in a single minute, an engineer showed two views of a matrix showing all requirements were traced to an element in the model and all model elements were connected to a requirement.
Chris cautions that linking doesn’t help you if you haven’t connected the right requirements to the right elements. He says, “You’re still going to need a human to double-check, and that’s what everybody’s job is on that program, to constantly validate that that matrix shows up with the right checks in the right lanes in the right boxes.” This reminds Jonathan of one of Chris’s five firsts from the previous episode. “One of the first things you said was these tools, techniques are no replacement for doing the right work,” Jonathan says. “It doesn’t mean that you connected the right requirement to the right architectural element.”
Some of the gaps that digital threads bridge include integration across often-siloed engineering domains—whether silos of engineering discipline or security or anything else. Linking requirements to system architecture to models not only offers everyone from every silo the information they need, but also allows them to see it in their native environment. Chris explains, “They don’t have to be a Doors Next Gen expert. They can go use and exploit the digital thread from the tools that they’re experts in to understand what’s allocated to them.” Digital threads also makes impact analysis easier when change inevitably happens. Chris says, “You’re going to have changes, and you’re going to need to know what’s impacted by that change. When you have a well-thought-out and well-crafted and curated digital thread, that’s going to take minutes to hours to understand your impact analysis, compared to days or weeks.”
Advice for Building Your Digital Threads
The first tip Chris offers for implementing a digital thread is to understand what you want from it. “Start with the end in mind,” he says. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there—and you might not like where you end up.” Another tip is to remember that you don’t have to trace everything all at once or ever, just because you can. Trace what’s important to get you to your goal.
Chris is also clear that every digital thread is unique, everyone’s doing things differently, so there’s no right, wrong, or recipe. There’s just what works for your organization. That said, the idea of implementing a digital thread is more than just the connections and traceability. If you don’t have good processes already in place, or if your existing processes don’t make sense in the digital realm, you’ll have to work on those before creating your digital thread. “A lot of process steps are put in place because it was a manual, intensive human effort,” he says, but those should be rethought and automated, not digitized as is. The low-hanging-fruit example he relates is doing away with distributing information for review to various parties and collecting and adjudicating comments individually and manually. “Instead, you can do a lot of these reviews online now where I have a model,” he notes. “I show up three days later to look at everybody’s comments, and it’s all done. I know what to do.”
Chris closes by encouraging everyone to “get on the train” of creating digital threads and transforming tired engineering practices. He adds, “if you don’t know where or how to start, call a friend. There’s no shortage of folks on LinkedIn peddling this. Or reach out to us here, and let’s have a conversation. But don’t delay.”
Learn More About What Digital Threads Can Do for You
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what Chris as dubbed the “digital cable,” the importance of authoritative sources of truth, why Chris says you don’t know what to trust without configuration management, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 148: The Question Every Digital Thread Has to Answer and join us each week for a new podcast.
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