Discovering Digital Engineering Needs Through Human-Centered Approaches

Abstract

Digital engineering has the power to transform organizations in profound ways, but digitizing legacy workflows and infusing new technologies into existing practices may not yield the intended results or address the underlying problems or bottlenecks. This paper describes the human-centered approaches used to understand stakeholder challenges and identify digital engineering needs during the design-build-test portion of the systems development lifecycle. Through a series of interactive stakeholder workshops and need-finding activities, key stakeholder needs were identified to help guide the integration of digital engineering technologies. The overarching need was for downstream system development steps to be considered further upstream in the project lifecycle in a manner that allows for proactive and interactive co-constructive idea exploration, problem resolution, and requirements considerations in a collective engagement with engineers and technicians from multiple disciplines to increase efficiency and reduce risks while offering opportunities to improve the final engineered system. Supporting this need was a wide-ranging desire from stakeholders for digital and non-digital support structures for efficient rapid iteration during system development. This work yielded several improvements for system development processes and for digital engineering infusion.