Fantastic, to see these thoughts formalised and put in a story, thanks for posting.

I‘ve been meaning to do something similar for a while, but my main topic lately, solar power and economy, usually takes up the time I have available to write things in Medium.

I too am a professional now working in the space of enabling companies to “WFH”.

For me it seems to have happened by accident, I fell into it. My role in the years leading up to covid is/was a Model Based Systems Engineer.

In essence, MBSE is all about Engineering Systems in the virtual space.

For many years, we’ve seen and wielded the power of model based design, which is designing clearly defined simpler products, to meet small numbers of stakeholder concerns, by designing and simulating virtually, before committing expense to physical products.

MBSE is the extension of model based design, to enable large scale complex systems including company processes and structure which may not yet be clearly defined, having many stakeholders with different ideas.

Put simply, MBSE is virtual systems Engineering, where many stakeholders can virtually gather round, and work on virtual versions of the product, prior to committing it to physical implementation.

Effectively a virtual shop floor, with virtual products everyone can virtually gather round and work on.

Like you identified, spreadsheets and other conventional office tools now just can’t cut it.

In the sphere of MBSE, MSOffice is being replaced by low cost Enterprise Architectural tools which speak a plethora of graphical modelling languages, enabling all activities to be worked with and integrated, by all participants.

We are moving from document driven working, to model driven working, across whole companies and large scale systems.

We used to specify subsystems and systems in the form of requirements, sometimes tens of thousands of them, but now we are specifying in terms of models.

Now, the specification for a complex large scale system is a model, fully de-risked by simulation, and the designed system response is also a model, again fully de-risked by simulation.

We used to do work building bigger systems by labouring with armies of others over huge documents with piles of requirements, in the office, 9 to 5.

Now we build even bigger systems WFH by drawing some pictures around some requirements.

I will spend some time to do an article on it sometime soon, also.