7.00 AM
Wake up and get ready for the day. I live quite some distance from work, so it is an early start. Fortunately, BAE Systems is very flexible with work arrangements, so I can work from home three days out of a week.
8.00 AM
If I am working in the office I am already on the train. If I am at home I might start work earlier or do what I like with the extra time. I do interact with people in later time zones, so starting at 9.00 am is more useful for those meetings.
8.30 AM
Still traveling in, or otherwise at home getting ready for work. Might go for a morning run if I feel like it.
9.00 AM
I usually start work at 9am, so the start of my day is catching up on any emails that may have been sent to me overnight, any issues that I may need to action during my day or finding where my time is best spent during the day.
9.45 AM
Team stand-ups! As I am acting as a systems engineer I have to interface with multiple teams to ensure they have the support they require to complete their tasks. This involves working in advance of them to plan out features, supporting the development and approval of requirements and testing and assisting with the documentation process.
10.00 AM
My typical day-to-day work includes both supporting the other teams and also assisting with the long term systems engineering tasks, such as developing the system architecture of upcoming platforms and components, maintaining databases used in systems engineering and reviewing system and functional requirements.
1.00 PM
Some days of the week we will have a midday meeting, either with the entire project or between the systems engineering team. The entire project meetings are once weekly and keep everyone up to date with how the project is progressing. The team-specific meetings get more technical, where the systems engineering team often discusses potential system architectures, tips and tricks for the tools we use and to find where our resources are best used.
1.30 PM
Lunchtime! If I’m at work I can step out of the office and into the CBD and eat some great food with work colleagues or if I am working from home I can take a break and make something myself.
2.00 PM
After lunch I continue on with the day’s work. As my work involves working within multiple teams, which are often at different stages of development I am working across multiple fronts and at different stages of the systems engineering process. In a single day, I have jumped from contemplating and creating high-level system requirements to confirming the requirements I worked on a month ago have been successfully implemented and tested and now working on generating the documentation to close out this feature.
4.50 PM
The end of the day. If we need to meet with international partners we may have meetings even later in the day.
6.00 PM
Either I’m cooking dinner at home if I worked from home, or still traveling home if I was in the office.
7.00 PM
If I worked in the office I’ll be home and start on dinner or otherwise, I will be relaxing at home.
10.00 PM
I try to stick to a good sleep schedule, so at 10.00 pm bedtime Is usually what I aim for.
12.00 AM
Still sleeping
I would like to move into something related to aerodynamics or potentially something up at Williamtown working on the lead in fighter, which BAE Systems supports.