talking good

[Ginger Booth]

Glen,
    I think you've hit it close on. I'd go a little farther, though. It's
not that SysEng is The Bridge. It's that with your customers,
you've found that bridge works. For another customer, you
might find you might need to hammer together another bridge.
Your email even suggested that with the SysEng bridge, part of
progress was due to teaching them your language. Not everyone
is that good at foreign languages.... Especially since it's hard to
get them to sit still for 2 days' immersion training. ;)

    In other words, my experience is that the two parties need a
common language to talk, that's mutually rigorous enough to deal
with the business at hand. If the language isn't available, or proves
awkward, sometimes creating shared experience has worked for
me. That's where GUI's come in Real Handy. I can talk until blue
and get nowhere on mutual understanding, then pull a GUI out of
a hat that makes it experienceable (? :), put it in their hands so
they can really drive the thing, and then we've got shared experience
to base a conversation on.

    I've had particularly lousy results with the teaching-them-my-
language approach. They generally don't care, and since I don't
blame 'em, I'm probably not assertive enough to carry it off.
(Note, Glen, the "because I don't blame them" clause there, not
that I'm incapable of being assertive. ;)

    I dunno what the most basic feasible shared language is. I've
done hand-waving and scribbling on napkins and GUIs and got
by somehow in Japan and France. I suspect the bare minimum is
competence in math, respect for a method/protocol/recipe/some
orderly progression of steps/rules/whatever, and willingness to
overcome the barriers and communicate. In practice, I find it's the
willingness that falls flat. And as I've gotten old (creak, creak ;)
I've quit being willing to take more than 75% of the responsibility
for making a communication work out. Because if the other party's
not willing to meet me partway, it's never going to work anyway,
so let's quit early and part friends. ;)

My two bits,
    Ginger

P.S.(For newbies on the list, I'm on the programmer side of
the bridge, but span to the domain side, which I generally
find more interesting. ;)

"glen e. p. ropella" wrote:

> Some might argue that it's only because I have alot of experience
> modeling different things.  But, I don't think that's the reason.
> It's systems engineering that is the important discipline.  If
> both the modeler and the programmer know systems engineering
> techniques (like revision control, iterative requirements
> definition, life-cycle analysis, quality control, verification
> and validation, peer review, etc.), then it doesn't matter what
> domain you happen to be an expert in.  The common language of
> SysEng provides an adequate bridge.



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