It is the end of November 2022. While the cold is setting in MoD Boscombe Down, military aircraft testing site in the south of England, a high wincing sound appears out of nowhere. Rolls Royce is successfully performing its ground testing program for their hydrogen gas aero engine (source). A modified AE2100 turboprop engine has been built and rebuilt incrementally to continuously evaluate and validate assumptions such as: “can we find an alternative method for heat dissipation in the existing Pearl 15 jet engine fuel infrastructure?”. Conventional fuel in existing jet engines is used for combustion but also used for cooling of certain modules. Hydrogen does not have the same cooling characteristics as kerosene-type turbine fuel. Thus “what do we have to change to prepare a jet engine to safely run on hydrogen?”.
Tremendous efforts to fulfill the aim of a hydrogen fueled future in aviation.
Hardware development projects such as these are hugely expensive, challenging, and uncertain. With multiple suppliers involved, sponsors funding the project, and engineers from all over the world, the hydrogen jet engine program needs an approach to ‘stay in control’. In control of the project risk exposure, in control of knowledge management, and in control of project progress. However, we know that in software development projects we can ‘use Agile’ to stay in control? But Agile does not work for hardware development projects… right?...
Traditionally these high-stake hardware development projects have been built around strong project management and making early decisions on the approach. Once decisions are made on a design-approach, the engineering work to-do is broken down into small sub-projects for each supplier or engineering discipline, generating small ‘sub-projects’. Involved engineering teams do their best to develop the best possible deliverables for their sub-projects, only to identify issues late in integration with deliverables from other sub-projects. Integration is often painful and inhibits development as it ‘acts’ as a pause moment in product delivery. In other words; traditional projects postpone part of the project risk to the future integration moments, essentially mortgaging their future. Anyone that has been involved in large hardware development projects is aware of this phenomenon. And many examples have been published about the risk of late integration, such as in the development of the beautiful Boeing 787 passenger aircraft (source).
Katherine Radeka, developer of the Rapid Learning Cycles Framework, describes the need for “pulling learning forward to eliminate uncertainty” (source) in large hardware development projects. More specifically, the incremental and iterative development of products is well known and used in Agile ways of working. Early elimination of uncertainty (or early validation of assumptions) pulls the validation cost to an earlier stage in your projects. And as earlier validation introduces an ‘earlier need to collaborate across multiple engineering disciplines’ it creates earlier collective learning. Ask any seasoned mechanical, mechatronica, or electrical engineer; iterative or explorative development is at the heart of engineering. A project management approach that is based on early decisions (e.g. 'the design has been made for you; just build it'-approach) contradicts that.
It is therefore not a surprise that Rolls Royce adopted an Agile way of working, and an “Agile Product Lifecycle Management” approach to manage their projects. The iterative approach allows small stable engineering teams to develop their product deliverables, frequent reflection, and frequent replanning to meet integration milestones. As a matter of fact, Rolls-Royce has actively and publicly been sharing their learnings about their way of working in public MOOC’s and via press releases (source). The iterative way of working gives the engineering teams of Rolls Royce a “really good early indication of hydrogen combustion, how we control it, how it can work, and it will give us some clues about some of the other areas we need to work on” according to Alan Newby, director aerospace technology and future programmes at Rolls-Royce (source).
Agile for hardware does not work? Well, soon Agile will fly you to your next holiday destination.
PS. For those that are into the topic of Agile for physical product development (e.g. hardware, engineering, manufacturing), let me know what you think about it!
Cheers,
Ali