A brilliant spectrum of reds, yellows and greens… That is what I see out of my office window, and I realize that it has been a while since I posted. This is party due to my summer vacation, but mostly due to my sabbatical from writing about innovation. With over 26M hits on a Google blog search with the topic of “innovation”, it is making me rethink my approach and my value-add to the blogosphere.

I have been spending my free time by going back to my roots: engineering and software development. My time is spent acquainting myself with the Django platform, reading about product design, and coaching a FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) team with my husband for a robotics competition coming up in December. With that, in recent weeks, I have been playing with LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, including turning my dining room into a robotics lab! I have to admit, I am new to this, since LEGO® was not part of my life when I was growing up. And although my son has been involved with LEGO for most of his life, I have only been an occasional sidekick, helping out when he needed it. I must say, I missed out, but now I’m working hard to make it up.

Though we are coaching 10-13 year-old boys, I noticed an amazing amount of similarity between playing with LEGOs and managing engineering projects. I hope you enjoy my observations, and please let me know if I left out anything.

Note that I find job titles personally challenging… Though I specifically mention engineering managers, for me this covers anyone that has the duties of managing a technology and product combination, along with the responsibilities of people management.

Generalist.. Specialist.. Aha! Specialized Generalist!

This topic deserves a more in-depth discussion, as it is an area I ponder about a lot. I am a technology generalist with a specialization in technology management and product development. Yet, I wonder if I should have a technology specialization area, but then question what I would have to let go in return…

An engineering manager needs to be a generalist for successful commercialization of technology and its products. By definition, her focus should be on integrating and bridging technology, business, people and executing the engineering development life cycle. Yet, to be successful in this integration role, the engineering manager also needs to have sufficient understanding of the technology, product and industry, i.e. specialization. In her role, she must:

• Be part of the team: speaking the same language;
• Lead the team: defining and building the new language, norms and culture;
• Have imagination and creativity for what is possible;
• Understand practicality for what is doable given constraints and resources;
• Have wisdom to understand where the risks and challenges are;
• Have knowledge to educate, promote and close gaps;
• Be fearless to jump in, explore and show the way;
• Have the power to inspire, motivate and drive results;
• Have the ability to distill all for effective (and efficient) tools and processes;

All this is necessary to be a good engineering manager. I lost count of the number hours I spent surfing through different robot designs, learning about the parts’ strengths and limitations, figuring out how to best navigate the NXT-G software, and just understanding what it means to build a decent robot through hands on exploration and prototyping. It all helps to build the next generation of engineers and hopefully successful performance at the competition.

Design for modularity and reliability

Anyone who is a LEGO fan won’t be surprised to hear that there is a real science behind how to design LEGO systems, how to build them for stability, reliability and strength. My 11-year-old son seems to have the knack for this! He seems to know all the different LEGO parts, how to best put them together, how to make them modular and yet still attractive.

FLL challenges require different contraptions to navigate and complete FLL missions within a set (short!) time limit. This challenges your critical thinking skills in how best to design and engineer your robot. With that, modularity and reliability of your design drives the repeatability and performance of your results. Through experience and lots and lots of prototyping and testing, you learn:

• about real-life constraints (ambient light, inertia, gravity…);
• reliability and repeatability is king queen!
• how to setup for easy real-time product reconfiguration;
• that nothing goes as planned. So test, test, and more test!

Empower… Motivate… Time manage!

Organizational behavior and motivation is a complex and broad topic. Interestingly enough, the challenge of how to effectively motivate doesn’t seem to depend on age…

FLL challenge is about kids and driven by kids. As coaches, our role is to inspire, empower and motivate for results, with hopes to grow future engineers. It is amazing to see how moving a robot utilizing a touch sensor for navigation can brighten a youngster’s day.

Encouraging creative and outside-of-the-box-thinking is a primary focus of the coaches. Our success depends on how well we read each child, and learn what motivates them into action. Believe me, each has their own degree of focus, from some being extremely short to others who would shame many adults. With that, managing time is our most important element. We walk a fine line between providing enough space to explore/empower and minimizing wasted time. There is nothing more powerful than showing kids what they can achieve through careful handholding and directing. As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same…

Building a productive workforce

Time to market is the new reality. Yet, many factors affect productivity, which is the key driver in time to market:

• environment,
• skills and experiences,
• tools and processes,
• external resources,
• quality, …

As engineering managers, our job is to understand the possibilities, assess the risks, and close the gaps in any and all areas. We also need to understand what is under our control, and make peace with anything that is not. Turning my dining room into a robotics lab is my way of controlling the physical environment, to improve individual focus and increase team work.

However, tools and processes also directly affect individual creativity and productivity. Tools can have natural constraints (such as with the NXT-G development environment), and processes need to fit within the team culture and capabilities. Tailoring tasks to align each individual’s strengths, motivations and weaknesses is key to building a happy and productive workforce. And for this age, perhaps any age, when everything fails, showing, demonstrating and proving possibilities works to kick things into high gear.

Value of rich ecosystems

“Ecosystem” refers to the concept of a community working and functioning together as a unit with its developers, suppliers, customers, users, manufacturers, competitors, research groups, … Anyone who has ever evaluated a new technology, utilized the Open Source community or just Googled an unexplained error message from your operating system understands the importance of having a rich user community.

LEGO has a strong universal brand with a very active user community. Even with their strong control of LEGO brand, one can find LEGO part suppliers, such as with robotic sensors (though, this is still small when compared to Apple’s ecosystem). At the same time, their brand strength doesn’t carry to LEGO’s education division, such as with legoeducation.us. I recently ordered two different LEGO robotics education set. It was quite humorous to receive two sets of parts and storage trays, where one set’s trays came in a mid-size blue plastic LEGO storage container, and the other was just trays in a generic brown shipment box. In addition, annoyingly enough, I cannot get a container for these trays, as they’re slightly too big to fit into any containers sold by the company. Fortunately, none of their building bricks seem to have this type of incompatibility…

LEGO has a very rich user base: LEGO Club, numerous blogs, LEGO Engineering, MINDSTORMS Community NXT, FIRST Forums, … This rich set of resources and a large community to share with makes the LEGO experience useful, interesting and fun for anyone and at any level of expertise. Just think what it would mean to you, if you could nurture and reap the benefits of a rich ecosystem and the strong brand of your product.

Building LEGOs are easy…

And, fun! They demonstrate the challenges an engineering manager faces, including topics that I haven’t touched like rewards, dealing with disruptive  children employees, agile development processes, introducing new tools and technology to your teams, testing and product quality, … Though they may seem like toys, they are real engineering projects, requiring curiosity, ingenuity and a lot of persistence.

Wish us luck at the upcoming competition!

Technorati Tags: LEGO, FLL, engineering management

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