Special Forces Engineering’s Role

Over the course of my career, even the most meticulously planned/staffed engineering projects on which I worked faced significant resource and/or time constraint issues at some point. Whether it was an unplanned, sizable design modification, project scope addendum or scheduling error, management was forced to allocate additional, unplanned engineering resources to complete the work.  The larger sized companies were frequently able to solve this from within the organization by reallocating departmental or divisional resources. Smaller companies, especially those in the start up phase, had no recourse but to seek outside help.  Sometimes, we were fortunate in being able to justify and quickly hire additional engineers to address the immediate need and also remain as permanent team members.

Later, I found myself “moonlighting” to provide this type of engineering support at various companies in the aerospace and medical device industries, both large and small.  It required the commitment of working long hours in short intervals and a “deep work” focus on creative problem solving. I found a great deal of personal satisfaction in being able to step in and deliver whether it was new product design from a clean sheet of paper or manufacturing process development.  What I found common to all of these situations was consumption of the front end project buffer, adverse project visibility ramping proportional to schedule impact, and a narrowed customer focus on finding immediate solutions. Based on these experiences, I started Special Forces Engineering with the goal of being able to rapidly deploy on solving our customer’s engineering needs and provide timely, thorough and reliable solutions.

- Dan Mullins      

Get in and define the problem, deliver a highly effective solution as verified by the customer and get out of the way.