A gift that keeps being given
It's my birthday tomorrow, and it's a significant one. Not only does it divide nicely by ten but, based upon the mutterings from my family, I have apparently reached the age of suddenly becoming the stereotypical dad whose family only know one thing that he likes* as a gift. I've been aware of this phenomenon since childhood, when I became aware that my dad was very fond of Chocolate Oranges - only the plain ones, mind you - and that's what he got every year from age 36 until the eventual passing on of my maternal grandparents. That he didn't actually like plain chocolate at all and the whole thing was a misunderstanding arising from some off-hand comment lost in the mists of time is attested by the cupboard full of chronologically-shelved and gradually whitening plain chocolate oranges my parents still have in their kitchen.
So I await tomorrow's gift unwrapping with excitement, in that I have absolutely no idea what object my family have settled on as my annual reward for staying alive for each of the next mumble years. However, assuming they are doomed to miss the mark (through no fault of theirs), I've gone ahead and bought myself something. Here it is:
I've decided the company should own a plotter. Specifically, an A0 colour plotter.
This one (the HP T520 36") is a familiar model to me - I've sworn at one like it regularly enough in previous employment that this constitutes the devil I know and I'm confident that once the right drivers are installed, the carelessly-dropped pens have been fished out of the works and the wind is blowing in the right direction, it'll be possible to get very decent results out of it**.
So what's it for?
A gift that keeps on giving
Well, contrary to lazy stereotypes, I'd say the ability to communicate is probably the most universally necessary skill for any engineer. If engineers were not able to talk effectively to each other and to their customers, our modern world would not exist. The waving of hands and flapping of lips will suffice for simple topics but for communicating structure in a complex design they are poor substitutes for a picture or table.
As the owner of core architecture and functional definition, the Systems Engineer must spend a lot of time communicating complicated things to (and receiving feedback on them from) people that really, really need to understand them perfectly. This can become very repetitive and getting repeatedly ambushed in the toilets and asked to provide answers from memory risks inconsistency. It's much better to provide a set of consistent reference materials, but libraries of documentation squirrelled away on a network drive tend to get neglected - they are a struggle to search for the right information and are invisible day-to-day, which means they rot and cease to reflect the reality of the design. Better to print it, print it big, glom it to a wall and let everyone pore over / scribble on it together. It's a pleasant change for people to stand up and walk across the room to look at it, and if it is in plain site it becomes much more likely people will notice and whinge when it gets out of date.
So I encourage the use of posters. Lots of posters of different things. Lots of posters, even, of the same thing - choose different views on the same material and display them locally to the relevant audiences. Examples:
Produce a context diagram, showing the road-mapped system and variants and their context (users, interfacing systems, etc). Stick it up in a communal area to encourage the engineers to discuss it with the commercial people, for example.
Post the behavioral state machine for the UI as a state diagram in the Usability team's office, and the same information but rendered as a state transition table in the Software area.
Create block diagrams showing subsystems at different levels of detail*** - a less detailed (but no less enormous) one to stick up in general engineering areas, a finely-detailed one to go in the Systems Engineer's corner for reference when complicated integration questions arise. One with all the tubes and cables marked to go in the lab or prototyping area.
Provided the information on these posters is selected sensibly for a given audience and, crucially, kept up to date****, you really can't have enough big sheets of paper Blu-Tacked to the wall.
To summarise, get yourself a plotter. You'll have to excuse me now. I'm off to design the world's biggest birthday card.
* Chutney being the classic, but substitute any other harmless item of nominal value which he secretly doesn't really care for.
** Unless you are trying to print Gantt charts from Microsoft Project, in which case you'd be better off stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a sharp stick - it'll produce the same number of useful print-outs and hurt a little less, all without wasting any paper.
*** I prefer to set these out to reflect the physical layout of the system as far as possible.
**** Expect high turnover of diagrams. The second most important skill for a Systems Engineer turns out to be folding a slightly curly sheet of A0 paper so it'll fit into the slot on an A4 shredder. Make sure to get all the Blu Tack off first.