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02.12
The Heilmeier
Catechism
By Chris Brantley
The National Academy of
Engineering recently announced that IEEE Fellow
Dr. George H. Heilmeier would be receiving the
2012 Charles Stark Draper Award, along with
Wolfgang Helfrich, Martin Schadt and T. Peter
Brody, “for the engineering development of the
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) that is utilized in
billions of consumer and professional devices.”
With its half million dollar
prize, the Draper Award is one of the world’s
most prestigious awards, often dubbed the “Nobel
of Engineering.” It honors an engineer(s) whose
accomplishment has significantly impacted
society by improving the quality of life,
providing the ability to live freely and
comfortably, and/or permitting access to
information.
Without a doubt, LCD technology
has had a tremendous societal impact and
Heilmeier’s innovations, while part of the
engineering team at RCA Laboratories in
Princeton, are worthy of this high honor. By
putting Heilmeier in the spotlight, however, the
Draper Prize reminds us of other significant
contributions by Heilmeier during his long
career in the U.S. Department of Defense and
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
Texas Instruments, Bellcore/Telcordia, and the
Science Applications International Corporation.
In particular, Heilmeier made an indelible mark
as a manager of research and development, and is
also well known among technology managers for
his famous “Heilmeier’s Catechism.”
The Catechism was a standard set
of questions developed by Heilmeier for use by
his program directors at DARPA when reviewing
new R&D projects or funding proposals. It
followed him as a management tool throughout his
career in industry, and was widely adopted by
others who sought to emulate his success at
translating technology-related research into
commercially-viable products and services. There
are several formulations of the questions in
circulation and the Catechism itself has been
adapted for use in different contexts, but the
version that appears most frequently is the
following:
Helmeier’s Catechism
-
What are you trying to do?
Articulate your objectives using absolutely
no jargon.
-
How is it done today, and
what are the limits of current practice?
-
What's new in your approach
and why do you think it will be successful?
-
Who cares?
-
If you're successful, what
difference will it make?
-
What are the risks and the
payoffs?
-
How much will it cost?
-
How long will it take?
-
What are the midterm and
final "exams" to check for success?
In a 1994 IEEE Spectrum
profile of Heilmeier, author Joshua Shapiro
described the Catechism as a “preflight
checklist,” which “provides a routine for safely
and successfully launching a research project.”
The checklist not only helps
managers anticipate and address the problems of
technology transfer, innovation and invention;
it also reflects Heilmeier’s basic philosophy of
successful technology management. Unlike many
managers who focused on leveraging the available
technology to derive new innovations, Heilmeier
believed that technology strategy begins with
the business problem to be solved, and not just
with a focus on the technology itself. He
observed that engineers and managers who became
invested in specific technology-focused
strategies were often resistant to change and
unwilling to try new approaches, resulting in
fewer innovations. His government experience
also taught him the perils of the prevailing
“over the transom” method of technology
transfer. In industry, he championed the use of
“interdisciplinary teams” comprised of
representatives from R&D, product engineering
and manufacturing, as well as marketing. And he
believed strongly that all members of the team
should interact with customers.
One measure of the success of
Heilmeier’s basic approach was the reputation
DARPA developed during his tenure as an
entrepreneurial federal R&D entity. Not only
were program and funding proposals subject to
greater scrutiny under Heilmeier’s management
catechism, but DARPA’s technology strategy and
associated budget proposals routinely garnered
strong support from the Secretary of Defense and
the military brass because they addressed
problems that were easy to understand and
appreciated by the beneficiaries of DARPA
technology. Under Heilmeier, DARPA focused its
strategy on six over-arching themes that were
elegant in their simplicity:
·
Create an “invisible aircraft”
·
Make the oceans “transparent”
·
Create an agile, lightweight tank
armed with a tank killer “machine gun”
·
Develop new space-based
surveillance and warning systems based on
infrared focal plane arrays
·
Create command and control systems
that adapted to the commander instead of forcing
the commander to adapt to them
·
Increase the reliability of our
vehicles by creating onboard diagnostics and
prognostics
George Heilmeier retired in
1997, but Heilmeier’s Catechism lives on, having
been adopted and adapted by a generation of
managers who were influenced by Heilmeier during
his tenure at TI and Bellcore.
The value of Heilmeier’s
Catechism is not limited to just engineering
managers. Last March, Terry Martin, a
self-described “start-up affectionado and tech
developer,”
posted a “reminder to the startup community
to think about Heilmeier’s catechism when
creating products or solutions.”
In a Feb. 2010
posting at ext.IT, Paddy Healy observed that
“when I read [Heilmeier’s] list, it struck me
that these questions could easily be adapted as
a software project checklist. With some small
tweaks in language, this list becomes a standard
project checklist that any consulting
organization should work on with their customers
to answer when deciding whether or not to go
ahead with a project.”
And in a July 2010
blog post (Biobits) on “Heilmeier’s
Catechism,” computational biology grad student
Chris Miller observed that “every second year
graduate student should have a worksheet
containing this list as they prepare to propose
their thesis project. It’s equally applicable to
grant applications, product design in industry –
damn near everything you do in science really.”
These three brief examples
illustrate the legacy of George Heilmeier and
“Heilmeier’s Catechism” and reminds us that the
Catechism’s nine simple questions remain a
valuable tool for proposal writers and
technology managers today and in the future.
Related Reading:
SHAPIRO, J. George H. Heilmeier.
IEEE Spectrum 31, 6 (June 1994), 56–59, online
at:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=284787
For more about the Draper Award,
see:
http://www.draperprize.org
Chris Brantley is managing
director at IEEE-USA in Washington, DC.
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