making sense of change

In a world of rapidly advancing technology, someone has to keep things under control.

By Wade H. Shaw

The field of engineering management has developed rapidly in the last 50 years. That's not too surprising in light of the increasing role that engineering and technology have played in people's lives over that time.

As a formal study, engineering management dates to the early 1950s, when engineers began to work in teams to design the increasingly complex products sought by a public with an insatiable appetite for improved quality of life. Decades later, schools around the world continue to see growing enrollment in their advanced-degree engineering management programs.

It's no longer the 1950s. Society has changed, and the phenomenon of the computer has exploded and morphed to serve a vital role in industry and in everyday life. The products that industry makes and the tools that it uses—including the technology of product development itself—are evolving daily.

Engineering managers oversee the product development cycle, from design to manufacture.

Industry has a growing awareness of the need to manage the innovation process, but even so, practitioners and instructors still hear: What exactly does the field of engineering management include? The answer seems to depend on whom you ask.

Some engineers think the discipline is an extension of their own specialty, but with management training added on. Others see the field as a variation of basic business management, with the precepts tweaked to adjust for managing technical people. Still others in industry debate how engineering management is related to other disciplines like industrial engineering or technology management.

At its most basic, engineering management is the process of envisioning, designing, developing, and supporting new products and services. Engineering managers cleave to a set of product requirements. As they keep those requirements uppermost in mind, they must also make sure the product stays within budget and on a set schedule.

And they must take just the right level of risk. They have to ensure that the design cycle doesn't lag, for example, but also doesn't move so fast that engineers gloss over important details.

Managers For A New Age

But why are engineering managers necessary? What do they do? How do they do it?

In answering these questions, we gain insight into the educational requirements, skills, and competencies of engineering managers. The answers also give us a frame of reference that can be passed to other engineers and managers who could benefit from an understanding of what engineering management is all about.

First question: Why engineering management? The answer in a nutshell: to design and develop products and services.

It's hard to imagine an engineering manager who toils to manage a research and development process that doesn't result in a product or service. Even those in a pure laboratory environment face business-performance issues. And even a research and development laboratory needs to see results. Basically, the reason engineering managers exist is to ensure that engineers use solid engineering skills and tools to design and deliver high-quality products and services.

Second question: What do engineering managers do? For that answer, we must turn to a systems engineering model.

Systems engineers develop large and complex assemblies or combinations of related parts that work together. Systems engineering has emerged in recent years as a way to translate customer needs and requirements into complex, engineered solutions.

The modern view of project management also includes the role of a chief engineer—or systems engineer—who oversees the technical aspects of a design project.

Calling upon all types of design technologies is part of an engineering manager's duties.

I suggest that the activities a systems engineer performs are the same as engineering managers take on. The basic concept is the same: translating customer requirements into completed design, while considering the product lifecycle.

Hence, engineering managers are engineers with a management mandate to accomplish system integration.

Third question: How do engineering managers do their work? Again, we turn to a model, this time project management.

Engineering managers manage projects. This is different from other types of managers, who manage people. Teams of people typically carrying out product engineering and those teams are tied together by a common purpose, a set cost, a set schedule, and defined quality constraints. The process of managing that engineering activity is engineering management.

Delineating this who, what, and how of engineering management leaves us with a more focused idea of the field. To wit, engineering management uses a systems engineering approach to oversee the team development of products and services. The idea applies to all fields of engineering.

And the linkage to customers, projects, requirements, budgets, schedules, quality, and risk puts the engineering manager in a distinctly executive management light.

Future Challenges

The who, what, and why of engineering management isn't static. Each aspect adapts to changes in technology and the marketplace. With that in mind, we can do some conjecturing about how the practice and education of engineering managers will look in the future.

Expect to see new products and radical changes in old ones. Advances in materials, nanotechnology, computing, bioengineering, and energy systems will definitely affect the practice of engineering, making for ever more complex products.

The need to understand and manage product complexity will emerge as a distinct challenge to engineering managers.

Expect, too, to see engineering managers focus not only on overseeing the product lifecycle in the future, but also on managing the innovation process. (Stefan Thomke of the Harvard Business School has some ideas of his own on managing innovation. Engineering Management's editor, Jean Thilmany, reports on some of them in "Experiment—Early and Often" in this issue.)

Managers will consider manufacturing and related costs when choosing a product design, rather than focusing mainly on the design costs. You also can expect to see more systems engineering concepts used to develop new products and services in the future.

Standards are a good indicator of the maturity of a practice, and the systems engineering field will likely mature in the near future to include a set of standards. The emergence of standards for systems engineering will provide a framework for best practices.

Systems engineers develop complex assemblies, much like engineering managers.

Systems engineering will become part of the project management discipline, to distinguish engineering projects from other initiatives organized to accomplish business objectives.

Simulation technology will continue to emerge, too, as a design tool. Engineers will take advantage of the technology to understand relationships between design variables, to predict performance, and to anticipate the lifecycle of the project itself. Because future designs will be much more complex, engineers won't be able to build a physical mock-up or prototype for each design iteration.

Project management for engineering should mature to a more specific form that could be called project engineering. This maturity will come as generic project management skills are enlarged to include the management of customer requirements, of risk, and of cost, and are expanded also to include system engineering and lifecycle planning considerations.

There will also be more interdisciplinary product teams. Team members might come from industrial design or information sciences. These types of teams are effective organizational structures and the complexity of modern engineering will further promote their adoption in industry.

Managers must have people skills and be aware of what's going on.

The makeup of the team will become important. We'll learn that constructing a project team is a design problem, as is constructing the product itself. Leadership issues will move to the forefront of project management and the selection of a project manager will become a process that's conducted much more carefully.


The traditional emphasis areas of managing a product's budget, schedule, and quality will shift to managing its customer requirements and its risks. Cost, schedule, and quality will be project constraints; the real goal will be managing the customers' requirements to ensure that their needs are met with acceptable levels of risk. Requirements and risk management will be used to drive and justify cost, schedule, and quality.

We'll see the emergence of a project strategy, whose goal will be to connect the overall plan of a project with the strategic plan of business. Currently, this connection doesn't exist and projects often exist with little vision toward their ultimate strategic value within the business.

Current and Future Education

All of these future engineering managers need training, and universities in the United States and abroad haven't been shy about stepping in to offer it.

Schools of engineering around the world have adopted engineering management programs in an effort to respond to student interests and industry needs. Engineering management programs exist at bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. levels, although the master's option is by far the most prevalent. Most programs offer a combination of technical courses, management courses, and specialized engineering management courses.

Yes, an engineering manager is still an engineer, but an engineer with a graduate technical education—an engineer with the classic management skills associated with an MBA. However, an engineering manager is more than simply an engineer who receives management training or an MBA. To be sure, training and education are quite beneficial. But it's important to remember that engineering managers should possess a specific set of competencies beyond those covered by a technical or management education. Managers also must have people skills along with an awareness of what's going on in society.

Engineering managers could be said to act as a beam that connects the science and engineering side of an organization with the classical management aspects of the business. Engineering management is definitely a bridge between these two.

Simply telling engineers about management skills is likely to produce the same result as explaining engineering skills to managers: You get a better awareness of the roles, but you don't get the bridge.

The key to building successful engineering managers is to give them hands-on experience in the defining areas of product development, systems engineering, and project management. This could be done through an internship with industry, which many educational programs offer today. It is practice that will give these managers insight into their art.

After five decades, engineering management is a still-evolving discipline. But then, it probably must always be that way. Consider, after all, the rapidly changing world that engineering managers will serve.

Wade H. Shaw, an IEEE Fellow, is professor of engineering systems and director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, and is editor of the Engineering Management Review.

© 2005 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers