Continuing our 'My Engineering Career' blog series, we hear from Craig Stephens Senior Director at Medtronic, volunteer and a Fellow of the IET. Craig tells us about his career in the Automotive industry and where it has taken him:
Who am I and what I do
My name is Craig Stephens, I am nearly 3 months into my role as a Senior Director Product-DNA at Medtronic. This is after 1 year of retirement and prior to that, 35 years at Ford Motor Company.
I graduated as an electrical engineer (EE) in 1987, before joining Ford as the first EE in Ford of Europe Powertrain Calibration. This was a huge learning curve, but despite being highly inexperienced, it gave me an opportunity to contribute from the very beginning.
Engineering controls and me
Controls were what inspired me in my undergrad degree and up until my latest appointment that’s all I’ve done. I started in Powertrain Controls, that then moved to Vehicle Level Control Systems, and eventually Automated Driving and Robotics.
In a career as large as Ford it is possible to go deep into one area or to be more general. I chose to specialise in Controls/Embedded Systems. For my first four years with Ford I was based in the UK. In my last project I was responsible for the engine controls on the Escort Cosworth which was absolutely the most fun possible for a young engineer. My manager asked me to take a 6-month assignment in the US, to understand the implications of new On-Board Diagnostics Standards for our European Products.
This gave me exposure to a whole new very tightly regulated area of controls which actually ended up being, say, at least 30% of our software. It also led me to spending the rest of my career in the US where I married and brought up a family. Never thought for a second that I would leave the UK, even when I came to the US. That was very far from my career/life plan.
Inspiration and education
There was never any question about what or who inspired me. My father was an electrical engineer who worked for the BBC, where he was involved in the first colour TV broadcasts. At home he was always working on projects and, particularly keeping the family car running. At high school, computers were just starting and when they came out my parents bought a BBC Micro, which inspired my interest in programming (in BASIC at a time when programs were stored on cassette tape). My career plan was to join the RAF and become a pilot, but my second-year summer job at Ford made me think more about industry, which I decided to try for a year…which turned into a lifetime.
My biggest challenge in education was the deeply theoretical stuff. If I couldn’t see a line of sight to a practical application, I found it hard - and hard to be interested. That’s what got me into Controls. In hindsight I might have been a better fit for a Polytechnic degree but I have no complaints with the route I took.
The value of an engineer…depends where you are
The stereotypes of engineers are very different around the world. I think things have improved in the UK, but it was very clear that in Germany and the US the profession is much more highly respected. The biggest stereotype - which was completely true - was that it was entirely white male and even though progress has been made there is still much to do. In solving hard problems having a group of people with diverse perspectives gets you to the right answer much more quickly. This remains a pressing challenge and organisations like the IET and STEM activities such as FIRST Robotics are helping with the change. Both my children are engineers and from what my daughter tells me we still have more work to do to welcome women into our profession.
Projects that challenged, with solutions that solved
Almost every project I have been involved with has been rewarding and amazing. Those that stand out were the hardest engineering problems with the greatest teams.
Here are a few of them (in chronological order):
- Engine Controls lead for the Escort Cosworth,
- First application of networked controls over Controller Area Network (CAN) in a Ford vehicle,
- A Ford Explorer mild hybrid which we correctly cancelled, but put us on track to deliver the Escape full hybrid,
- 2010 F350, Superduty Diesel, a huge technical challenge, with a brand new engine meeting new emissions standards that were infinitely harder than anything that preceded them,
- Implementing EcoBoost (our proprietary gasoline direct injection technology) a year faster than was thought possible,
- Our L4 automated driving vehicle project,
and
- Leading our Automated Driving and Active Safety team globally.
So many projects, so many great teams. Some of these projects required long-term commitment and fundamental research into solving hard problems.
My personal view is that long term goals require solid short-term goals. Automated Driving is an interesting case in point. When I started working in the field there were Driver Assistance Technologies like Forward Collision Warning, Adaptive Cruise Control and Blind Spot Detection. These were valued by customers and good sources of revenue, but even these came with tough problems to solve.
The people that worked on these technologies usually didn’t believe in the idea of self-driving cars. There were others who took a step back and saw that if you removed the constraints of cost, self-driving might be possible. The two DARPA Grand Challenges raised a level of awareness and belief that self-driving could be done by redesigning the systems from the top down.
Ten year later ADAS systems have evolved to have sophisticated perception systems and computers that can navigate, do path planning and provide high levels of automation. This allows for hands-off driving, with eyes-off driving under certain conditions also being possible. My point here is that automated driving is a long-term project and having well thought out, near-term goals that bring it closer are powerful in accelerating the journey.
Businesses always want to know how quickly the future can be here (2 years is usually the preferred answer!). But, if the solution is not known, making that prediction is foolish - as we see with self-driving cars creating a classic hype curve. To accelerate the technology, development requires careful prioritisation of which problems to work on, and an investment strategy that adds-in money as the delivery risks are reduced. In the fully-automated-driving arena the investment clearly ran far ahead of the risk reduction.
Problem solving and a pointer on how to do it
Engineering is problem solving, and this is where working with great teams is so rewarding. Production problems are the hardest because in the days before connectivity you usually had symptoms and no data. In these situations, it was very important to have diverse skills in the team to allow for some lateral thinking. The idea to put you on the right track could come from anyone in the room, no matter their background or seniority.
One Friday night we were called, to be told a plant hundreds of miles away had been shut down because there was something wrong with our control system - and some vehicles were setting fault codes. The first hint of the solution was that we hadn’t changed our software, but we didn’t know if there had been other changes that interacted with our controls. Our breakthrough came late on Saturday when we discovered this plant had two assembly lines and that all the problem vehicles came from one line. It wasn’t an issue with our controls at all, but it needed our expertise to solve the problem.
In complex systems the biggest risk is in system interactions, either intended or unintended. One of the biggest obstacles in problem solving is the human desire to avoid admitting you own the problem. That is reinforced when problem solving starts with trying to assign blame. In my experience what is needed more than anything is for someone to take the lead in solving the problem. A frequent issue in my time in engine controls was that engines would not start. That could mean, fuel, wiring, anti-theft systems, a controls issue, etc. My team usually took on these issues because we had the skills and tools to help find where the problem was the quickest, which is really what the company wants.
Adding to Society
Sustainability and Safety are fundamental. The automobile has had a profoundly positive impact on human existence, but we learned that exhaust emissions and CO2 have profound consequences on humanity, which led us to hybrids and EV’s. I spent my whole career in reducing emissions and I am pleased to say that there wasn’t equipment that we have today to even measure the emissions, when I joined.
The whole internal combustion engine, vs. hybrid, vs. EV is a really important question. Engineers need to enable the best technology for each of these modes, to make them affordable and optimal for their use case. That’s an incredibly difficult equation to balance – but it is what engineers do.
Safety is surprisingly easier, especially today with the engineering techniques that have been developed for Functional Safety. My personal standard was easy - would I be happy to let my wife drive my children in this vehicle or let them walk on the street / ride their bike with this vehicle on the street? Learning about Functional Safety was one of the things that most attracted me to the field of Model Based Systems Engineering. It provides the engineering discipline to design-in all the key product attributes; safety, quality, performance under real constraints like cost, time to market, supplier capability etc. These are all addressed in a structured design process and not discovery by trial and error.
Remaining relevant
Keeping up with the pace of change is a challenge that every engineer faces, we need to keep building new skills to stay up to date. When I became a manager one of the top technical people in my team had been hired by Ford to do X-ray tomography on gas turbine blades when that was considered a viable Powertrain. He ended his career as our foremost expert on neural networks – he was super smart and continued to invest in learning his whole career.
As my career developed into management, I found myself spending more time on people than on engineering problems. This was incredibly rewarding for me, but it made keeping up with the latest technical advances hard.
In 2000, I took a management position in Research. I was very self-conscious of the fact that I only had my Master’s degree and most of my employees had PhD’s. What I found was that if I was willing to admit what I didn’t know, my team was very willing to spend time giving me the knowledge that I needed. I have generally found people to be very generous with sharing their knowledge.
I had also scheduled two two-hour Tech Reviews each week, which provided a venue to technically review projects and a way for myself and my whole team to learn. This was essential to remain qualified to do my job, which also included anticipating what the company would need five to ten years down the road. Connectivity, touchscreens, automotive radar, computer vision, prognostics, artificial intelligence and machine learning were all far in the future, or not even imagined when I joined Ford, so I had to keep learning. I would not claim to be an expert in any of these fields, but I believe I knew enough to successfully lead teams that were working on them.
Why professional registration
My views on this have changed, my father was in the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). As a result, I was exposed to IEE activities long before I became an engineer, so it was natural to pursue Professional Registration at the end of my degree. I’ve continued to be interested in the engineering profession as a whole, and what we do to meet society’s expectations of our work. I have also noticed how easy it is to become insular in your own field - keeping abreast of adjacent fields is often a source of new ideas. As I got older, I became more interested in being part of nurturing the next generation of engineers which is very much part of the IET’s mission.
I learned to never stop learning
I chose to stay in automotive controls for my 35 year career in Ford. When I started we had 32k of ROM, wrote our software in Assembler. When I retired, we were using advanced AI/Computer vision to enable automated driving.
A constant through that has been the drive for better engineering processes that provide reliability and robustness without increasing development times. It must be said, the system complexity is beyond what I ever imagined when I joined.
I chose this path because it was the field I loved and brought me joy. My career has taken many twists and turns, some I initiated, and some was initiated by others. As I grew in my career, I became more interested in technical leadership, so I moved from engineering into engineering management. I learned that I really liked the time between pure innovation and production.
That drew me into a career mostly focused on the Advanced Engineering phase. I ended my career as the most senior Control Systems leader in Ford. Every day it felt incredible to spend time with the people creating amazing new tech. This meant, that as my career evolved, I needed to spend at least as much time working on my leadership skills as my technical skills, something that was important to me. I treated leadership as a skill to be practiced each day, that was always ripe for experimentation, learning and improvement.
What I’ve noticed…
Our education systems tends to confine us to our disciplines; electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, control systems, etc. In my work it was essential to have better than a working knowledge of engineering more broadly. The engineer in Embedded Controls today must have a solid background in formal Systems Engineering, and Simulation is the key to engineering new products in the future. Engineers also need to be practical and relate to the end users of what we create - a beautifully engineered product that the customers can’t use or don’t like won’t be successful.
Two-way mentors
It comes down to learning; our network of relationships helps us to keep learning and growing. We need to keep looking outside of our own crowd and comfort zone to stay relevant.
I enjoy mentoring a great deal and have found great joy in having relationships with younger or less experienced employees who have gone on to have great careers. These relationships are absolutely two way and I learn at least as much as my mentees do. It is wrong to think of mentoring as just being about me passing on knowledge and experience.
You never know where people will take you
I am forever grateful to one of my first managers, Bob, for being an outstanding manager. So much so I still try to model myself on but in my own style. He pushed me in a direction which changed my life and my view of my career.
As we have already seen, I was working on the Escort Cosworth, still an iconic vehicle even today. I was doing my best engineering and working on the greatest product with an amazing small team. Bob called me into his office one day and told me that he wanted me to go to the US to learn about new regulations for On Board Diagnostics. I had some insight into this area, although it was one of my least favourite aspects of my job. So, I told Bob I was quite happy doing what I was doing and wasn’t interested in going to the US. He then said he was moving me to a different assignment no matter what, and he really wanted me to take the US assignment. He also gently explained I needed to remember that since Ford paid my salary, the company got to pick what I did.
This was a profound lesson, and he was absolutely right that I needed to go and do something new. It was also true that although I had done some great things on the program, the person that replaced me did more new great things that I hadn’t seen. I carried this learning with me my whole career; when you know how to do a job it’s time to either move or find something new within the job. I also learned to be more open minded about new assignments, especially when a trusted manager asked me to do something outside of my comfort zone.
After 35 years in automotive, moving to Medtech is well outside my comfort zone. My former manager said he thought it would be a great fit. He was right and this is a great new adventure for me.
Offer tips on how to establish and nurture meaningful professional relationships. Listen first, ask good questions and then listen more. Try to get to know people, what is important to them, what their strengths are and always be there to help if needed. As a leader empower people to do their best work. On my first day at Ford my supervisor said “I expect you to make mistakes but don’t make the same mistake twice.” A good thought, mistakes need to be found quickly and learning from them as individuals and organisations is a key to progress.
I wish I had…
As I got promoted, I spent more time on people management. I should have worked harder to retain my real practical engineering skills. A hard balance to achieve, but it would have been personally more rewarding and I think I would be a better engineer today.
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