 Subunit 1.4 attributes of a system engineer. So system engineers are known as system thinkers. These are people who see the whole picture. It says here they go wide in their thinking that they really can look at, kind of stand back and look at a big system development project from above and understand how everything comes together. They can view it from all the different perspectives because remember a big system is going to have all these different disciplines involved in a system engineer, a system thinker can view it from all their different perspectives to see interdependencies between them and where those interdependencies might cause issues and how to resolve those issues. They can think about potential benefits of the system and how it has to come together to achieve those benefits and they can think long term. So they're not only focused on the problems of today and problem solving but they're looking downstream as to what are all the other problems that might come up in the development could be and how to address them before they become significant. So system thinkers understand different models of how to develop a system and know when to apply those different models to the problem that they're working on. Then they can think about all the unintended consequences so again they can be addressed early on. The majority of good systems engineers that I've seen have come from discipline organizations. They've done detailed either design, analysis, software design, whatever. They come from those disciplines and they grow into systems engineering. When they come into systems engineering they probably have to learn how to get let go of doing the details. And by time they get experienced I think we systems engineers do morph into a common type. That would be a type that knows how to keep the details at arms length and to delegate and to not lose sight of the big picture. The other aspect that I think that most systems engineers fall into eventually is the ability to get comfortable working in a situation where you take chaos and bring structure to it. It's an interesting question how scientists and engineers work together. Scientists are accustomed to thinking of the big picture thing. Seeing how a star works or a galaxy works and we realize that there are tens, hundreds of thousands of different things that we have to think about and we try to draw the big picture. And that's the kind of systems engineering in science. What is the systems engineering of a living thing? I'd like to know that. How does this solar system work? There are thousands of different processes to think about. So when we come to think about how do we design an apparatus some of us are able to think that way too. And then in the end however we have to say okay this is my idea but real professional engineers how do you do it? So I like to work with systems engineers because they are my people that are most parallel to in the engineering part of a project. A good systems engineer understands what the scientist says and knows what it means for engineering. Some of our best systems engineers are scientists themselves who have decided that they really like to make things happen and work with teams to make them happen. So we have a lot of parallels with the systems engineers. As a project manager system engineers are key to my success and so on my organization chart I have a system engineer who reports directly to me and runs a system engineering group that makes sure the whole spacecraft comes together and is integrated properly. And so we sat down and we said well what are the key things a system engineer does? First thing is they manage all of the spacecraft-wide budgets call it a budget it's like money but in the cases we're talking about with engineering it's things like mass and power and pointing capability where you have each engineering discipline say the power or propulsion people they want to have a certain amount of mass for their subsystem they're going to be building part of the spacecraft and it's going to weigh a certain amount. Well the overall spacecraft can only weigh a certain amount to be safely launched on the launch vehicle that you've been selected for and so the system engineer has to allocate out the mass to make sure that there's a percentage available for everybody building their parts and then make sure that everyone stays within their mass budget and if anyone needs more mass then it has to be traded against somebody else. The system engineer also holds reserve and you'll hear more about that in another class where some of the mass is not allocated out to the subsystems they will hold that in reserve and so if somebody comes and says my gyroscope is going to weigh a lot more than I thought it would could I get some more mass allocation? You could use some of that reserve but it's the system engineer and the project manager working together to kind of evaluate when does some of that have to be allocated but you can see that that's a cross spacecraft issue it's not something that the thermal engineer or propulsion engineer by themselves could solve it's really something that you have to have an overarching engineer who could see the whole system to be able to work that. The system engineer on a team is in charge of any trade studies where you're looking at alternatives and making decisions about what might be best to use for say propulsion which is a hydrazine system is it a bi-propellant system what would be the best choice the system engineer is going to be heavily involved because the impacts of picking a propulsion system might have impacts on power might have impacts on attitude control and so they have to be able to look across this whole spacecraft to see what other impacts to the system there might be the other thing is systems engineers are involved in looking at how all the elements of the spacecraft interface to one another the power system has to provide power at certain voltages and currents to a lot of components attitude control a lot of computers on board and so the system engineer has to make sure that all the interfaces are well defined and that when the spacecraft gets plugged together in the end and every one of the discipline engineers finishes their job the spacecraft can operate as an integrated system and so that's a key part of their role is managing interfaces and then the other thing that we use the system engineer for is to manage all of the large reviews you're going to learn a lot about technical reviews so as you're developing a spacecraft you go through a large requirements review to make sure you've properly documented all the requirements for the mission that happens early on later you'll go through design reviews where you're going to have your design put in front of a board of people that are not working on the mission experts in the field and they'll evaluate your design to see if you're maturing it to the point where you should be given the go ahead to build your spacecraft and so those design reviews and requirements reviews are led by the system engineer and they pull the team together again because they can see across the spacecraft they pull those big reviews together the last thing and I mentioned it before is risk management so the system engineering team and the lead system engineer are responsible for managing the risks of the project and making sure that the risks are being managed and mitigated where possible you not only need to be an expert in the case of space systems engineering and in the world of aerospace and understand things like power and thermal and propulsion but you also have to have the right behaviors and the person who can pull the team together you can work with different disciplines and you can help them all achieve the common goal now click on the icon to watch Gentry Lee's systems engineering when the canvas is blank to understand more about what a system engineer and it does and what their attributes are then answer the discussion forum questions make sure to post your answers to the forum and collaborate with your peers