Systems engineering organizes Sanford Lab

If you?d struggle to define terms like ?configuration control,? ?project requirements? and ?risk management,? there?s an easier way to understand the work of the systems engineering group at the Sanford Lab.

?It?s very logical,? Systems Engineering Manager Steve Acheson says. ?You can see things easier?run your project better?if you organize your data so you don?t have to dig through tons of documents to find it.?

Systems engineering was pioneered in the 1940s by Bell Labs and the Department of Defense, and later at NASA, as a way to organize large engineering projects. Now both the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy use systems engineering principles to keep projects on schedule and on budget.

Acheson and his colleagues?systems engineers Charing Hage and Pam Hamilton?are coordinating 15 major Sanford Lab subsystems. They include electricity, cyberinfrastructure, transportation, waste-rock handling, security and 10 others. Acheson, Hage and Hamilton don?t design the systems. ?We?re the process people,? Hage says. They create and monitor processes to make sure services are delivered to the right people and the right places at the right times. 

Hamilton, for example, manages ?configuration control? (aka ?change control?), which is a way of tracking design, budget and schedule changes. She also manages systems to track risks to the project, quality assurance and document control. (Hamilton recently trained many of us on changes in the DocuShare document management system.)

Hage handles ?project requirements? at Sanford Lab. ?Right now we?re focusing on what the lab would look like with the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment,? Hage says. ?How much space will they need? How much power would they need? What sort of connection speeds would they need for their data? If LBNE uses a large water Cerenkov detector, how will we deliver purified water to them??

That last question is not trivial. A water Cerenkov detector could require 200,000 tons of purified water. Hage won?t design the pipeline itself, but she?ll have a system in place to make sure that the pipe from the surface will match the pipe at the experiment, 4,850 feet underground. ?I don?t care about the design,? Hage says. ?At this point, I only care about the function.?

The intersection of those two pipes underground illustrates how systems meet at an ?interface.? One of Hage?s most important jobs is to manage and document dozens of such interfaces throughout the project. ?I get to see the project from every perspective,? she says.