One of the key tenets of Systems Engineering or Systemic Thinking is developing an understanding of how the system (or a product under development) is going to operate or behave under various scenarios. This leads to identification of the right set of functions, acceptance criteria’s, operational modes of the systems and constraints from the operational environment if any. These discoveries are then formulated in textual form as requirements. This skill of identifying the right dependencies, with operational environment, both which can be both spatial or temporal in nature often come by timeover a period of time, by living and breathing in the system domain. For example, an aerospace engineer who has been practicing the domain for decades might be an expert in the aerospace engineering, but if he/she is tasked to work in a medical device, it might be very difficult for them to even comprehend where to start! Another example to consider is that operational environments also change with time or with additional applications.

Apart from having the right domain expertise, frameworks can come handy. Frameworks or patterns are tools that allow one to think systematically and come up with all possible questions to be asked. Frameworks can act like a to do list. One of the frameworks we learned came across from MIT is “Get ready”, “Set” and Go. This is a simple phrase used in at the start of a race to synchronize timing, to command all the participants to start at the same time. However, it can be applied to a much larger context, and to almost anything really!