Systems Engineers' Effectiveness in an Organization: Text and Visual Analytics Approach

The Helix project is a multiyear longitudinal research study focus on understanding what makes systems engineers effective. The Helix team gathered data through interviews, site visits, and surveys with individuals who are doing systems engineering (SE) work on programs, supervising systems engineers, using products from systems engineers, and are knowledgeable about SE. The responses provided by the participants were documented and analyzed using text mining techniques, such as topic modeling and word similarity. To interpret the results, the team developed several visualizations from three scenarios, full corpus, by organization type, and by domain. The visuals show the common language among systems engineers within topics and the relationship between words from the three scenarios mentioned above. Also, the article provides insights into what enables systems engineers to be proficient or effective in their organizations.