Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
How are quality tools Legos of development?
We talk about two philosophies of brick building and our use of the family of quality tools.
We also talk about seven uses of quality tools in product development.
Dianna and Fred discussing routine reliability from a listener’s question: when creating a reliability plan for a project, how do we separate the routine and unique parts of reliability activities?
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What types of things might happen when we don’t fully understand, explore, or address:
We explore a public consumer complaint and upset over coffee pods. And we imagine what may have happened (or didn’t happen) during design development that could have helped avoid the issues from the start.
What are some of the lessons learned from coffee pod stories?
We explore this ongoing, public story to gain some insight that we can apply to our own designs.
Dianna and Fred discussing hidden reliability wins: when reliability efforts go right, things don’t go wrong. So then, how can reliability engineers quantify their work?
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Dianna Deeney interviews Shere Tuckey about Crucial Conversations® in an engineering environment: how to prepare for and have difficult conversations with peers, managers, and everyone else. Shere gave a conference presentation about Crucial Conversations® titled, “How to be Persuasive Rather than Abrasive.”
This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.
Shere is a Branch Chief in the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. She is responsible for advocating, planning, budgeting, organizing, and directing the execution of a high-priority technology development portfolio as well as direct supervision and management of all personnel within the branch. Over the last twenty-nine years, she has managed twelve different teams across many engineering disciplines from shock physics experimentation to weapon effects modeling and simulation.
Shere has taken a special interest in leadership, mentoring, and helping teams communicate effectively. After being asked to serve as the Dean of Leadership for her organization’s workforce development program, she became certified to teach the Crucial Conversations® course as a foundational element of leadership development.
She has taught five highly rated classes to high level managers, junior employees, and everyone in between. The positive feedback received from these classes and the course’s universal applicability, has motivated Shere to share this knowledge in as many forums as possible.
Shere also shares stories of success.
Listen to take your communications skills to another level, at work and everywhere else.
This is the wrap-up, final episode of our series – the 7th episode in our series about generating ideas with a team toward action.
Since the start of 2023, we focused on a few quality tools and methods to both generate ideas and then choose which idea to pursue.
We’ve talked about:
We also interviewed an expert in brainstorming and learned the importance of planning for teamwork, including choosing our team.
What have we learned through the last few weeks? Let’s highlight take-aways and next steps.
We’re in our 6th episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd through 5th episodes was about using Quality Tools to help us group, explore, prioritize, and decide on an idea.
There’s one more method to consider in this series: a design sprint.
A design sprint utilizes all of these things we’ve been talking about. We talk about the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and how these ideas fit together.
We’re in our 5th episode of our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd was about grouping and exploring ideas. The 4th was about screening ideas. Now, we’ll look at ways to compare ideas.
We’re still considering that we’re just after brainstorming, at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps.
Let’s compare ideas with our team so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activity:
We’re in our 4th episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd was about grouping and exploring ideas.
We’re still considering that we’re just after brainstorming, at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps.
Let’s instead screen our ideas so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activity:
We’re in our 3rd episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The previous two episodes were all about idea generation.
We’re now at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps.
Let’s group and explore our ideas so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activity:
Dianna and Fred discussing engineering projects and dealing with product characteristics and requirements.
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Dianna Deeney interviews Emily Haidemenos about product design with brainstorming. She hosted a workshop at a conference about this topic, titled “Brainstorming: The Solution to Structured Problem Solving”.
This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.
Emily has a master’s degree in Design and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. After initially working as a Design Engineer, Emily left and moved into a New Product Development Quality Engineering position. In this role, she worked with multiple cross-functional engineering teams to ensure the effectiveness of quality systems while earning her Six Sigma Black Belt certification. Now as a Chief Engineer for next generation high voltage automotive products, she aims to grow and develop a team of technically competent individuals who realize their maximum potential.
Listen to be inspired to either take on brainstorming or change-up how you’re doing your sessions!
Dianna and Fred discussing new innovations from a reliability point-of-view: how is this new stuff going to break? What are going to be the new ways to break things?
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Sometimes we need to gather with our team and come up with some ideas, whether we’re looking for new product ideas, trying to discover possible solutions, or we need to improve a service.
Gathering a team to come up with ideas is common. What are some of the ways we approach this activity? We talk about systematic and structured methods and new approaches to brainstorming.
As engineers, we need to write reports all the time.
Are ours getting returned by reviewers frequently?
Or are we not getting any feedback and are not sure when our report is ‘done’?
We explore the spirits of technical writing past, present, and future – they help us to write for ALL of our audiences. We explore how and why in the episode.
