Adrian Clingeleffer Email & Phone Number

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

As Head of Discipline - Software Engineering I am responsible for the software engineering capability at Saab Australia. This role involves understanding the organisational engineering discipline resource requirements and ensuring the right people are placed into the right roles, both in the short term and over the long term (in line with the company strategy). I also have responsibility for the processes and methods deployed within the organisation to ensure we are continually improving by embracing best practice and applying appropriately within our working context.

Adelaide, Australia

As the Systems Architect for the Underwater group I provide technical leadership in designing flexible system architectures by exploring commercial best practise (encompassing people, process and technology) and finding clever ways to apply this to our system contexts.

Adelaide, Australia

Seconded to work with Lockheed Martin Australia I was the systems engineering lead for an Integrated Product Team dealing with systems infrastructure. This role provided an excellent opportunity to help shape the engineering approach and share my experience with the team. It also proved to be a great learning opportunity and allowed me to hone my skills in a dynamic and technically challenging environment.

Adelaide, Australia

Responsible for the design and system architecture of the 9LV Combat Management System (CMS) for Australian projects. Also responsible for collaboration with Saab Sweden to evolve the 9LV product to meet emerging market needs.Key responsibilities include: • maintaining the integrity and security of Australia's 9LV CMS architecture • managing the 9LV CMS product portfolio to meet both current and anticipated market needs • ensuring product R&D activities are aligned with overall product strategy • identifying and managing relevant risks related to the 9LV CMS • capturing and maintaining relevant product requirementsMy biggest takeaway so far is that it is the people which matter most. Technical issues, emerging software trends and system architecture debates are all good fun - but its strong collaboration, empathy and patience which forms a platform to develop a shared vision for our product's future. "Favouring collaboration over always 'being right'" is easy to say but often harder to live, yet essential when working with globally distributed teams, each bringing their own culture, expectations and motivations.During my tenure I led the introduction of an automated test framework to successfully sell-off Customer requirements with full automation of UI interaction (including exercising complex graphical elements).

Adelaide, Australia

As a Systems Engineering Manager (International Defence division) my responsibilities include: • definition of engineering activities; • definition and oversight of engineering processes across a range of engineering disciplines (systems, software, safety etc.); • responsibility for delivery of all engineering outcomes (quality, schedule, cost); • reporting and monitoring of progress, including planning early corrective action; • maintaining positive interactions with key stakeholders (both internal and external); • fostering a great sense of team ownership and allowing the project teams to flourish; and • staff development, performance management, coaching and mentoring.I’m also actively involved in supporting management in applying lean principles to increase internal process efficiency, including leading a “driving positive change” initiative to introduce a continual improvement framework. This framework has proven very successful in identifying and addressing weaknesses, threats and noteworthy opportunities. Perhaps more importantly the framework gives the team ownership of improvement opportunities and a mechanism to help tackles those which affect them.

Adelaide, Australia

As a System Engineer I gained significant engineering experience (primarily in naval combat systems) in applying operational analysis and systems engineering methods to determine system performance, including: • elicitation and analysis of stakeholder needs; • system analysis and design; • functional and physical modelling; • establishment of engineering strategies and planning stakeholder interactions; • leadership of assigned system analysis and design activities; and • system analysis documentation and presentation.During this time I supported a variety of bids for new international opportunities, using my product experience and knowledge to help prepare tailored system solutions.Two things I learned from my time in systems engineering which I believe scale well for any venture undertaken are:► Never under-estimate the importance of interfacesIn engineering, the early definition of well-documented interfaces, co-developed with relevant stakeholders, greatly reduces the downstream integration risk. More broadly, an interface exists any time there is a flow of information from one entity to another. From daily stand-up meetings to inter-department resource planning – we all deal with different data flows (interfaces) all the time. As with engineering, careful planning and management of these interfaces is vital in minimising future issues, such as poor or untimely communication. ► Always consider operators (people) as part of the systemIf the operator is ignored (or deliberately excluded) in the design phases the risk of system non-acceptance or rework greatly increases. More generally, by demonstrating empathy and a genuine concern for people when implementing any change we can identify potential issues and handle with them early and collaboratively. The alternative is to be forced to deal with unexpected friction, push back and a lack of support from stakeholders – essentially dooming the planned change to failure.

Adelaide Area, Australia

As a staff-elected representative to the Saab Systems board I was lucky enough to be given the responsibility for eliciting, analysing and presenting the "voice of the people" to the company board members. The board composition included both Saab management (with a mixture of Australian and Swedish leaders) and external directors.This challenge was exciting, rewarding and occasionally intimidating. I learned a lot from the experience, gaining insight into the decision-making process of senior executives as well as exposure to how a company board really operates. I also had opportunity in this role to identify and communicate to the board a set of issues which were having a negative effect on staff morale, productivity and reputation. As a result, the issues were dealt with swiftly and decisively by management, having an immediate positive effect on the organisation.Execution of this role included international travel to board meetings held in Stockholm, Sweden.

Adelaide, Australia

During my time as a Line Manager I was responsible for managing the careers, training and development of up to 50 software engineers. This role complemented my other roles during this period (it was not a full-time role).Responsibilities included: • identification of future goals and career aspirations of managed staff; • identification of training opportunities; • facilitation of staff rotations; • conduct and normalisation of software competency assessments; and • provision of an independent escalation path for grievances and issues.I really enjoyed the challenge of working closely with developers in figuring out what they wanted to do and supporting them in achieving their goals. Another standout was gaining experience in the art of negotiation – a key skill when performing competency assessments with a group of developers possessing a wide range of experience, expertise and self-awareness.

Adelaide, Australia

As Integration Manager I was responsible for all software integration activities required to support a major division of the organisation, including: • management of the integration team; • selection and deployment of new technologies to increase efficiency of system builds and integration activities; • conduct of formal testing and support of urgent problem investigations; • configuration and co-ordination of test site facilities and test assets; • support of multiple major, parallel project deliveries; and • co-ordination and leadership of on-site installations of formal system builds.Some of the improvements in technology and process I led during this time (which are still in use today) include: • introduction of a wiki to increase divisional knowledge sharing and online interaction; • establishment of a nightly, automated build server and introduction of “development” and “stable” integration build streams with automated unit testing to greatly reduce the time take for developers to detect and fix software defects; and • definition of a lean problem reporting process for issues detected during integration and testing of developmental software, allowing for light-weight, formal tracking and closure of issues in a central, coordinated way.Since this role was a functional role, I quickly learned that servicing competing, equally important (internal) customers with non-aligned schedules was rather challenging! I found that increased two-way communication and early, open discussion of potential conflicts helped minimise the impact (and surprise) for stakeholders. This allowed the integration team to focus on collaboratively planning to alleviate potential bottlenecks together with the affected development teams rather than constantly.

Stockholm, Sweden

As the Software Team Leader for a complex, discriminating part of one of Saab's major products I was responsible bringing a diverse team of software engineers together to ensure timely delivery and a quality outcome. My core responsibilities included: • co-ordinating the everyday tasking of the team; • software planning and estimation activities; • progress monitoring and reporting; and • team performance appraisals.I was also given additional responsibilities which extended beyond pure team leadership into design ownership and collaboration with international stakeholders, which was kicked off with a technology transfer assignment to Sweden.The major task during my tenure was an object-oriented redesign of a legacy software design which resulted in a highly scalable, flexible software architecture which could be readily tailored for a variety of customer needs.During this execution of this redesign activity I identified an opportunity to develop and deploy an object-oriented framework to increase efficiency and standardise Ada module development. This framework has been adopted by the global organisation and proven very successful in allowing developers to quickly stand up a new software module – complete with resource handling, error reporting, timeout handling and tasking provided “for free”. Metrics show a saving of around 30% effort and 40% SLOC for a new module based on the framework.

Adelaide, Australia

During my time as a Software Engineer I gained significant experience in software development within a defence environment, including development in Ada, C++, Java, HTML and XML. I specified, designed, developed, delivered and tested several software modules in a large, complex software system, gaining exposure to the entire software development lifecycle. Building upon my time in Integration I focused on crafting quality software products which were designed from the ground up to integrate easily into the final system. As part of this role I was selected for an 18 month expatriate assignment in Sweden to help encourage cross-culture collaboration. It was during this time I learned the importance of communication, patience and empathy in the workplace – which is especially important when dealing with international stakeholders and customers.

Adelaide, Australia

As a software Integration Engineer I gained valuable experience in the following integration activities: • production and execution of system-level tests; • software and system debugging; • collection and analysis of system performance metrics; • co-ordination and interaction with software development teams; • maintenance of system configuration files; and • configuration and production of software builds.During this time I was also appointed Human Machine Interface (HMI) Coordinator, working closely with software teams to schedule and coordinate HMI deliveries whilst acting as the quality “gate-keeper” to ensure acceptable system HMI performance.My time in Integration provided me an excellent perspective on how systems really come together and the typical issues found at this stage of the software lifecycle. Understanding the potential upstream cost of a relatively small software defect which remained undetected until system integration time introduced me very early in my career to one of the core principles of systems engineering: do a little work early to save a lot of work later! Despite my protestations at the time (I was keen for a pure software development role) I now recommend any software engineer looking to fast-track their development should consider rotating through an integration or test and acceptance role early on in their career to gain a similar systems perspective.

Adelaide, Australia

In this role I worked with senior management to initiate and lead a cross-functional team of talented engineers in exploring innovation within Saab.The stated goals of the initiative was to provide a fun, safe environment in which customer-focused innovation, creativity and inventive thinking techniques can be discussed, practiced and applied to a real domain in order to: • produce exciting and novel opportunities; • transform the organisational culture to provide significant competitive advantage; and • demonstrate that innovation can and should be nurtured as a core competency.I ran weekly innovation training sessions and facilitated development of a mixture of “blue-sky” innovations as well as targeted practical innovations, focusing on creating a more lean, efficient organisation ("Faster. Better. Cheaper."). The culmination of the program was the development and deployment of an “innovation pipeline” to capture, assess and progress staff submitted innovations, supported by the development of innovation training modules to help drive innovation to become a core competency in the organisation.

Executive Mba, Business Administration And Management, General

Master'S Degree, Combat Systems Engineering

Bachelor, Computer Science, Mathematics