Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics

Short essays and thoughts (musings) on reliability and maintenance engineering topics.

Let me know your reaction and thought, plus any questions.

ISSN 2329-0080

Receiving Feedback Well

Not all of us are fortunate enough to receive great feedback. We all do receive feedback, and some receive very little actionable feedback.

If you offer proposals, give presentations, make requests, or even just ask for a favor, you will receive some form of response. It often is just an answer to the call to action, and nothing more.

At some point, you may be ‘pulled aside’ so someone can provide you feedback on your behavior, your delivery, your ability or skill. It is this type of feedback that is essential to your improvement. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

To Improve Reliability Get Good at Change Management

The process to design and deliver a reliable product involves identifying risks. Taking action to understand or mitigate those risks involves much of the day to day work of reliability engineering.

Taking action to set expectations and improve decisions involves change. Change of understanding, change of specifications, change of expectations, change of designs, processes, and results.

It is the changes, big and small, that occur that achieve the desired results for the customer and organization.

You also know that not every suggestion is greeted warmly. Not every proposal is funded. Not every recommendation is accepted. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Facilitation Skills for Reliability Engineers

We facilitate. As reliability professionals, we often lead teams to identify risk. We help cross-functional teams find and implement solutions. We bring people together and ease their ability to communicate clearly with each other.

Whether a leader or participant we have a role to achieve the desired goals. Our ability to facilitate enables us to work with others to get things done. Understanding how to facilitate well permits us to add value when leading or participating on a team. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The 7 Essential Elements of a Complete Request

Not every request we make is fulfilled. Not every assignment is accomplished. Not every task we assign is completed.

Why is that? Possibly, the lack of a complete request.

It may be the person we made the request to was incapable or decided to ignore us. Or, more likely, it may be our request was not clear.

An unclear request increases the chance the desired outcome will not occur. An unclear request permits misunderstanding and confusion to guide the path toward an unsatisfactory result.

Understanding the essential elements of making a complete request improves the chance the desired outcome will occur.

Let’s examine the 7 elements one at a time. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Discussion skills

Discussion Skills for a Reliability Engineer

Talking is not the same as a discussion or conversation. Talking is one direction only. If two people are talking, they are talking at each other.

A discussion is two way. When two people have a discussion information passes both ways, both speak, both listen.

As an engineer, there is plenty to discuss. We work with others to find solutions, make compromises, determine optimizations, and finish projects. We need to share our knowledge and insights, as well as learn from others.

You can learn to foster true discussions and minimize simply talking at one another. You can take steps to enable the give and take exchange of a discussion. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Listening Skills for Reliability Engineers

Listening Skills to Improve Your Ability to Communicate with Influence

Did you hear what they said? Or, were you busy loading for your next verbal barrage?

As my mother would remind me, one should listen twice of often as speaking. Something about the ratio of ears to mouths in the population. I have to agree with her, that one can learn a lot by listening.

Listening may not seem to be a skill that one needs to master. Yet, how often have you walked away from a meeting where one or more participants obviously were not listening? How often are points repeated in an effort to be heard?

Being able to listen, listen well, can be honed and improved. A focus on being a better listener will improve your ability to communicate and influence as a reliability engineer. It has benefits beyond our reliability work, too. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Writing Skills

Technical Writing Skills for Reliability Engineers

Your peers, team mates, and management want to understand your writing. They want to quickly get your point, find supporting information, and take action.

As a reliability engineer, you write proposals, plans, and reports. You write problem statements, failure analysis findings, recommended process improvements, and much more.

You write to document a process or plan. More often you write to encourage others to take action.

Writing clear, concise missives the incite action is a hallmark of a good reliability engineer. You are doing technical writing.

You can learn to write well. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Ability to Influence

The Ability to Influence Reliability Performance and Results

The role of a reliability engineer is to support the other engineers and managers as they make decisions concerning reliability.

Our ability may be well honed and effective. Or it may be fumbling or annoying. It is our ability to communicate along with our technical ability that determine our ability to influence well.

We may do analysis or testing. We follow up on failures and evaluate suppliers. What we actually are doing is influencing decisions. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Overview of Presentations Skills

Presentation Skills for Reliability Engineers

We often present proposals and reports. We talk about the plan or results. We want funding, approval, or action. We need excellent presentation skills.

Excellent communication skills is often on job openings. It is not there by chance. Your ability to communicate well, especially via presentations is vital for your success and the success of your reliability program.

If your team, peers, or management do not understand your proposal or report when you present, few will take the time to read the material instead. Your presentation skills provide the incentive for action from your audience. Action you can guide using your presentation skills. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Case of Drones

Guest post by Dr. Amir Segal & Yizhak Bot of BQR

Introduction

Reliability engineers are equipped with an arsenal of techniques (FTA, RBD, Markov, FMEA / FMECA, SIL) for reliability, availability, safety and maintainability analysis. However, it is not always clear when to use each technique.
In order to design a safe and reliable product, reliability engineering techniques should be integrated with the system design process. This fact is well known, and today many system engineering conferences include discussions regarding reliability and safety [1,2]. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Soft Skills For Reliability Engineers

The Hard Part is often Soft Skills

There are many paths to becoming a reliability engineer.

If you are good with statistics, enjoy the detective work of failure analysis, or simply want to create a durable long lasting product, you likely found yourself in a reliability engineering role.

A science or engineering background is a great start. Time spent working with a design or maintenance team certainly help. An advanced degree in reliability engineering is another path.

The element that is often missing as a precursor become starting a career in reliability is excellent soft skills. We know the engineering and science stuff. The formulas, the testing, the data analysis. We can get stuff done in the lab or on the shop floor.

Yet to become an exceptional reliability engineer, or any type of engineer, add the ability to communicate well. Add the ability to get your point across and to wield influence to help others understand and accept your proposals, ideas, and results. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

Guest Post: Why Soft Skills Are the Hardest Skills to Acquire

A Guest Post by Kay Sandberg, Christopher Harding, and Will Wilkinson of Luminary Communications

Remember that first time you were asked to step into a leadership or management role, or to manage a client relationship? The experience was probably exciting and unsettling at the same time. Something different was asked of you.

While many of us have succeeded as individual contributors or team members, succeeding as a leader or manager requires a new set of skills we have often not been given the opportunity to acquire. This applies whether we carry an official leadership responsibility or not. In a future article it would be interesting to explore the distinction between “leader” and “manager”. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Using rain-flow counting methods for process wear out studies

Guest Post Prepared by Eugene Danneman, Wind Wear LLC

Introduction

Analyzing and visualizing data that is related to equipment wear-out (fatigue stage) over a specific time span is a challenge. Analyzing systems, equipment and components exposed to spectrum loading as opposed to uniform cyclical loading that span years or decades or centuries requires a special approach. Think of roads, bridges and other assets with long life spans that are susceptible to wear out mechanisms caused by external and internal loads, varying load durations, temperature swings and corrosion. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Perfect Strength and Stress Concepts

Recently Peter Stuttard asked if I knew of a reference for the perfect strength and perfect stress concepts. I didn’t and asked for a bit of explanation of the phrases.

Here is his reply (via Linkedin, btw a great tool to get and stay in touch) posted with permission with minor formatting edits.

To learn more about Peter check out his Linkedin profile.

Fred

Thanks for responding so quickly, the concepts of Perfect Strength and Perfect Stress are related to your discussion re Parts Count and Parts Stress predictions and reading this on your web site prompted me to ask you about them. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Need to Improve the Reliability Narrative

Little Compromises and Future Costs

In a recent Seth Godin blog, Counting beans he talks about the eventual costs of little compromises. The immediate benefit may be celebration worthy, yet

But overlooked are the unknown costs over time, the erosion in brand, the loss in quality, the subtraction from something that took years to add up.

This certainly applies to reliability as well. Deferring maintenance just one more month, addressing one more software bug can be done after shipping, and similar small shifts erode reliability of your system. [Read more…]