FEATURE ARTICLE

Twenty-five systems engineering practitioners from around the globe shared their stories, highlighting key events, decisions, individuals, personal traits, and learnings that shaped their careers. At 92 pages, LTMYS can be a quick read, but is perhaps better digested at a slower pace to allow personal reflection, comparing and contrasting their stories with your personal story.

My process of reflection combined the personal “resonates with me” approach with a bit of quantitative analysis and pattern-based structured thinking. First, I looked for common themes by filtering the document based on keywords (plain old string text searches), building on the most frequency “hits” by comparing side-by-side-by-side the “answers” given by the practitioners to derive common themes, beliefs or practices among the authors.