About apples and peanuts: My Journey of Redefining Problem-Solving at Siemens,"

In the middle of the normal daily rush and having to deal with numerous projects happening at the same time, a call from my supervisor took me by surprise when he asked me if I could help a team in another country to work on a proposal for a project that presented itself as a big challenge. I got the contact of the person responsible in order to better understand the scope that we intended to offer to the possible client. However, as soon as I started listening to the first words from the Siemens colleague, I already understood that the project indeed tended to be a real challenge. To summarize superficially, XHQ, an operational intelligence tool in which I am an expert, was tasked with collecting information from different digital control systems (DCS) and make performance indicators (KPI) available on unique screens developed specifically for this purpose. So far so good. After all this would be a project of the most common nature possible within my daily life. However, a few more details revealed that all information and data were generated and managed on offshore oil extraction platforms (FPSO); therefore, many variables should be considered in this initiative, such as cyber security, performance, integrity of data and stability in the information flow of the solution as a whole. Due to the complexity of this project, we suggested to the customer to start with a pilot with only one initial platform, which was already based on PCS7, also a Siemens product. They accepted our proposal and we kicked the execution off. We assigned local engineers to work directly on the customer's environment, and I stayed focused on attending meetings to design the solution architecture and occasionally providing the necessary consulting to colleagues with less experience in projects with XHQ. Furthermore, as this was a challenging project and with many new features for our entire business, I was also responsible for updating the US team with day-to-day information and avoiding possible obstacles from the software product and system interfaces.

If you are not an IT professional and are perhaps feeling out of place, imagine that a very good friend knocks at your door and invites you to grab apples. As you have done that all your childhood, and apple is a fruit which collecting process you are very familiar with, you promptly accept the invitation. But, as soon as you start talking to your friend you then learn that the apple tree is not in an open field, but instead it is located in a small island in the middle of a gigantic lake close to your house. Of course you don’t want to swing to get to the island, so you and your friend start then to discuss how would be the fastest, safest and, why not, funniest way to grab those delicious fruits.

Back to the real project, it didn't take long before problems and difficulties began to arise though. After all, connecting to a non-stop oil extraction platform and collecting real-time data in a reliable and secure manner can be a very challenging task. It was a Tuesday, and since I had a workshop scheduled for that day, I got up very early and checked my emails. As soon as I turned on the computer, the project manager, taking advantage of being in a time zone before mine, had already sent me a message and said he needed to call me. He updated me with the latest customer decisions and told me that the architecture we had initially designed had serious internal security constraints and therefore had to be fully re-evaluated. We talked for a few minutes and tried to come up with some ideas on how to restructure the entire system, but which we should most likely validate with some experts from other areas. In our apple analogy, it is if you and your friend had initially decided that maybe building up a canoe would be the best way to reach that small island, however, when getting to the lake you realize that very furious alligators live in those waters, so maybe another plan had to be executed.

“Coincidentally, today we are having a sales workshop here in Houston and XHQ's product manager and R&D director will be in attendance. I'm going to try to sit together with them today at some point and raise the issues that we've talked about. I will do my best to give you an opinion at the end of my day. Does it sound like a plan?” I commented to my colleague on the phone.

He breathed a little more relieved and said: “Yes we have a plan”. He assigned himself to align expectations with the customer while I talked internally with some experts so that we could outline the next steps.

I arrived at the office just in time for the workshop. I then looked for a place to sit, greeted colleagues who came from other cities and also from Canada, some of whom I had not seen since the pre-pandemic period. The lectures began and, with them, many interesting discussions about our business. As we reached the end of the morning, it was announced that we would have a free period of 30 minutes before the next schedule. I called two of the most experienced colleagues I have, and I also took the opportunity to ask the product manager if he had five minutes to help me with a technical discussion of a project. I asked the same to the R&D director, and he promptly ended a conversation he was having with someone else, and everyone gathered around me. I made a brief introduction to the four colleagues and said that I needed to clarify some issues and asked their help to validate a new architectural design of the solution, based on the complexity that the situation offered us. Returning to our analogy, imagine you and your friend call other neighbors to help design a safer boat, or another mechanism, to reach that small island.

“So, this is the project in question and now we have to overcome some new technical challenges that have arisen in the last few days. For that we need to come up with a new architectural design!” – I explained to them.

At this point, therefore, with everyone's attention and having made the necessary introduction, it was up to me to take a piece of paper (or board), draw the current architecture, explaining why it cannot be applied  anymore and then redesign a new proposed model, the which would be validated and criticized by my colleagues. However, there's something I need to explain in more detail at this point that made these dynamics a little more peculiar.

It's been almost 18 years with Siemens. During this period, I developed many activities within projects in the Industrial IT area, many of them with important decision-making roles that determined the success or failure of projects. Moreover, situations like the one reported above do not put me in unprecedented scenarios within my career. On the contrary, due to my experience, all this is already part of my daily job. However, from 2018 something started to change, and the word “challenge” took on a whole new meaning for me.

I have been living, since my childhood, with a degenerative eye disease called parsplanitis. Because of that, I have never had good sight, but at least my vision met the minimum requirements to be considered functional. In 2015, however, I totally lost one eye, and the other went into a phase of further degradation from 2018 onwards. In March 2021, the remaining eye got so bad that I was then declared blind. I spent six months away from work in order to try to get my thoughts together and re-learn how to work and, why not say, how to live. After my return, everything became, for obvious reasons, much more complicated and inaccessible. But, with the support of the company and my colleagues, I took a few responsibilities for new and old initiatives with operational intelligence projects, and the one above was one of those challenges. In any case, as you can imagine, drawing a very complex architecture on a piece of paper and defending an idea to my colleagues would not be an easy task for a blind person.

I sat down on a chair, cleared the table in front of me and everyone stood beside me. I took the coffee cup that was in my hand and explained to everyone that everything to the right of the object would be on shore, and everything to the left would be on the FPSO. I put my cell phone on the table and said that it would represent the server as the main data source. A colleague let me borrow his phone so it would also become another server that we should configure in the system. When trying to put another component in the architecture drawn on the table, I didn't want to use cell phones anymore, so I reached into my backpack and took out a jar with peanuts that I always carried with me. It became a separate server. To represent firewalls, I looked for some bookmarks that I also took with me in my backpack and then I delimited the security zones of the solution as a whole. In a matter of minutes, everyone understood the current situation, the challenges that we had before us, as well as the new architecture that I proposed to them. They all said the representation on the table looked clear and didn’t take long for them to start moving the pieces and making considerations, always telling me what they were doing, so I too would be able to follow what was happening there on the table. It was a very productive conversation, and I left satisfied that I was able to get the message across and work collaboratively with my colleagues to come up with a model that I think is the most appropriate for the situation. At the end of the day, I was able to report to all the project stakeholders the steps that we were going to take from that moment.

Four years have passed since I made the difficult decision to return to work. I cannot say that I have had smooth days. Every movement of my day to day is painful, because no matter how many times I have done an activity in the past, without the vision, all things are now unprecedented. And the examples would go far beyond designing a complex architecture for deploying critical systems. After all, any task, such as browsing a website or writing an email already represents a great challenge in my daily life. Hence, I can't find a better word to describe the most common feeling I have been facing than "frustration".

Nevertheless, when I calm down and analyze my daily life and the difficulties I face to perform simple tasks, I also see a great challenge in front of me, a gigantic barrier that needs to be climbed and that maybe, and just maybe, beyond this wall, a world of possibilities will be open in front of me. Obviously, assuming technical responsibility for a project as critical as the one narrated in this article is not for everyone. On the contrary, it requires a lot of experience, negotiation skills, listening to many people, brainstorming ideas and presenting the best possible path forward. Another important requirement is to have the ability to summarize all the characteristics above with clarity and to collaborate with everyone involved in the initiative. And, that I know I can do better than anyone! This is because I understand that years of experience with critical industrial projects for clients of many different verticals and industries enabled me to get to this moment and be capable of finding creative and innovative ways to overcome limitations and finally reach the expected result.

On the other hand, I know, more than anyone, that vision loss is indeed a tragedy, so I will never take myself as a fool and try to express that the lack of sight doesn’t represent a huge barrier for my career. But in any case, today I understand that other senses can help me to be the best professional solutions architect. In addition, I am sure that there are a huge number of possibilities in front of me and paths that I cannot even imagine at this moment will certainly open up and all my career and life experience will continue to be of great value.

I have no doubt that the best years of my life are yet to come, and no matter how many alligators are in my path, I will for sure cross that lake and get those apples!

 

Weber Amaral

Industrial Solutions Architect