Nice to see this subject being talked about, thanks for posting.

My own field appears to be converging somewhat, with us increasingly now applying more Enterprise Architectural modelling techniques to Engineering companies, projects, and products, specifically in schemas of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), as defined by the International Council on System Engineering.

Since working remotely seems to have become something which is now here to stay, the field appears to have come into ever more acute demand, with the effect that doing it effectively, can now make all the difference between whether or not a project or even a company is successful, as you say.

Good MBSE, by integrating all of the product domains, subsystems, and related business processes in model form, puts us back into a shop-floor environment, whilst no longer needing the actual shop floor.

By providing a kind of virtual shop floor, in which all can operate with a shared view, using model based techniques via a common user friendly toolset, everyone can see everyone else’s work in progress.

Thus we can work on whole system products in open-heart-surgery throughout the product lifecycle, avoiding most of the time normally taken up by end-to-end online meetings which are otherwise needed to report, communicate, and review information between subsystem groups and domains working remotely using older “Document driven” techniques.

I agree with you the biggest challenge in introducing these techniques, is setting an acceptable balance between progress of implementation, and ongoing profit. In the MBSE case this is especially where product development has already begun using document driven techniques.