Search Results for: Change Management

Small Companies Offer Faster Promotion but Higher Risks

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Based on my career experience as a project manager, I have observed that promotions can come quicker in a small company compared to a large one. This is especially true after you have gained several years’ experience. For some reason, many large companies are slow in giving promotions unless you are a rising star. If you are not a rising start and want to get a promotion, I suggest you look for opportunities in small companies to get the title you want (e.g., project manager).

Once you have the title, no one can take it away which means after several years’ experience in a small company you have a much better chance of getting the same position but with more responsibility and pay in a large company. The challenge is-do you have the right stuff to succeed in a small company?

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by Dianna Deeney 1 Comment

QDD 126 Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

Ever wonder why many product designs fail or why projects don’t always come out as planned? The answer might lie in how we approach the ‘problem space’ versus the ‘solution space’.

We’re celebrating two and a half years of Quality During Design podcast by revisiting the fundamental principles that guide our product design processes, and exploring how we can apply these principles to avoid common pitfalls.

We talk about the importance of staying longer in the problem space, using quality tools for teamwork, and understanding the power of pre-work in meetings. Listen-in to challenge our thinking and push us to rethink how we engage with new projects. Plus, gain insights on how questioning, investigating, and experimental approaches during project planning will empower you to refine your design processes.

We’re inviting you to consider how the Quality During Design methodology can streamline your design process, reduce product failures, and create more meaningful customer experiences. This isn’t just about designing products; it’s about redefining how we perceive and approach the entire design process.

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by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

The SR-71 Blackbird RCM Fallacy

Reliability by prevention vs. reliability by failure analysis

Here is a story of multimillion dollar aircraft failures that could have been prevented by spending $25. But no one did the risk analysis right using a financial model of the consequences. It’s also the story of why RCM is a poor maintenance strategy selection methodology. RCM will send you to financial disaster and you won’t even know it. Learn how to decide when doing preventive maintenance is far better for business success than doing the on-condition maintenance recommended by business-destroying RCM analysis.

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by André-Michel Ferrari 2 Comments

How Conservative and Prudent can a Risk Decision be? – Practical uses of Confidence Boundaries

Introducing confidence boundaries

Confidence boundaries can be confusing to reliability engineering practitioners and their audience. Yet, they can play an important role in the risk-based decision-making process. When building statistical models, there is always uncertainty around the model because it is usually based on a smaller sample of the studied population. The confidence interval is the range of values you expect your model to fall between a certain percentage of the time if you run your experiment again or re-sample the population similarly. For example, using a 90% confidence boundary, one would expect 90% of the records to fall between the upper and lower confidence boundaries. As a rule of thumb, the more data you have, the more precise the model and the narrower the confidence boundaries. In essence, if we have an infinite amount of data, we will end up with a perfect model. However, this is never the case. Confidence boundaries help establish the accuracy of the model and also provide some information on the validity of the data.

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by Ramesh Gulati Leave a Comment

The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Reliability-AM Professionals

Over thirty years ago, Steven R. Covey, renowned author and business management guru, introduced to us The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which presented an approach to being effective in attaining personal or business goals by aligning to what he called “True North” principles based on character ethics. This book has become a best seller, a must-read, and has sold 40 million copies worldwide.

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by Christopher Jackson Leave a Comment

Find Me the Statistics that I Like to Believe the Most …

It looks like 2023 will be the hottest year on record. Along with all the cyclones, hurricanes, floods and bushfires we have already had. Those who study and take climate change seriously unanimously agree that man-made changes to the environment are causing the climate to change so fast that mother nature will struggle to keep up.

And for the minority (yes, it is a minority as has been confirmed by many surveys and studies across the world), their arguments against climate change go something like this …

It might not be because of us …

… so it’s definitely not because of us.

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by Dianna Deeney Leave a Comment

QDD 125 Exploring Product Development and AI Through Literature

Exploring Product Development and AI Through Literature:

Insights from ‘Loonshots’, ‘AI 2041’, ‘Quit’, and “How Big Things Get Done’ (QDD Book Cast)

Ever wondered how the world of product development can be viewed through the lens of a physicist? How the future of AI will impact our existence? What a champion poker player has to say about quitting, and what we can learn about product development from an architect?

This week, we dive headfirst into those questions with four fascinating reads: ‘Loonshots’ by Safi Bahcall, ‘AI 2041’ by Kai Fu Lee and Chen Quifan, ‘Quit’ by Annie Duke, and ‘How Big Things Get Done’ by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.

These books have reshaped my perspective and I believe they hold interesting insights for you too. We’ll explore how these books apply to new product development projects and how they can help us do it better. I also share why I thought some were better together, read in pairs.

For those of you who love a good discussion, I’m inviting you to join my virtual book club where we can further unravel these intriguing books. Let me know if you’re interested!

So, tune in for a conversation that promises to be as enlightening as it is engaging!

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by Greg Hutchins 1 Comment

Understanding Context

Understanding Context: Context is Worth 20 IQ/EQ Points

podcast episode with speaker Greg Hutchins

Understanding context is essential for making smart, risk-based decisions and solving tough problems.

Understanding context is important to ensure you are correctly solving the right problem. Understanding context helps you understand the root cause of the problem and the key stakeholders. It helps you develop effective solutions. It helps you define your assumptions and biases. [Read more…]

by Larry George Leave a Comment

Proportional Hazards Reliability of Hysterecal Recurrent Processes?

Generations of products have similar field reliability functions because they are designed, processed, shipped, sold, and used in similar environments by similar customers. Replacement parts have similar reliability functions depending on replacement number: 1^st, 2^nd,….

Biostatisticians use David Cox’ proportional hazard (PH) survival function models to quantify effects of treatment or risk factors. Proportional hazard models could describe product’s failure modes, parts’ reliabilities in successive replacements, or products’ reliabilities in successive generations. [Read more…]

by Miguel Pengel Leave a Comment

Maintaining Equipment Reliability Amidst Frequent Employee Turnover

The mining industry in Australia has for some time been plagued by high turnover in its skilled maintenance workforce. The tough lifestyle and remote/regional locations are some of the main contributing causes, and have been for years, however other industries of employment offering competitive wages and a better lifestyle have in the recent years pulled the workforce from mining, leaving a void of labor numbers behind that have proved difficult to fill.

The common query, “How do I keep equipment reliability up, even with high turnover?” prompts a standardized response from most maintenance professionals – proceduralize the maintenance system to reduce variability and maintain consistent output. However, while this approach bears truth, it overlooks a substantial aspect…

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by Karl Burnett Leave a Comment

1770-1806 The Battle of Trafalgar and the Timber Crisis

Ships Don’t Last Like They Used To

Robert G. Albion was a notable historian of maritime affairs. He taught at Princeton and Harvard, and was one of the US Navy’s chief historians during World War II. In one of his books, Albion examined how timber management in Britain affected naval shipbuilding and maintenance policies.

In the late 1700s, the British Empire was more dependent on the navy for power projection, home defense, and security of maritime trade. In the age of sail, the average ship life was between 10 and 20 years. In the 17th century, British naval ships lasted 25-30 years. Albion found their average service life to be only 13 years in 1771. By 1792, service life fell to 12 years. In the Napoleonic period, the lifespan fell to only 8 years.

“The ‘life’ or duration of a ship was reckoned from the date of her launching to the time when her condition necessitated repairs as costly as the construction of a new ship.” The British determined service life by a basic level of repair analysis.

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by Arun Gowtham Leave a Comment

How AI complements Reliability Engineers

The tasks of a Reliability Engineer are long & diverse. While heavily dependent on the industry one is working in, it generally involves all aspects of the Equipment – from Design to Manufacturing to Operation to Maintenance. Even though the responsibility is wide, the resources available for a Reliability Engineer within an organization are limited. Often, there are only a few Reliability Engineers managing hundreds of Equipment. Given this current situation, the arrival of AI seems like a perfect resource to complement the work.

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by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

How to Manage Known Project Risks

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

A risk is an event or activity that can go wrong and cause an impact to the project. Risks can have a negative or positive impact to the project. Risks that have a positive impact are called opportunities. If they have a negative impact, they are called risks. A goal on a project is to try and balance risks and opportunities to mitigate the chance of cost or schedule growth.

There are two basic categories of project risk. They are the known and unknown. The known risks are the four project constraints (scope, cost, schedule, quality). Poor execution of these constraints is a major reason why projects fail. This paper addresses how to manage known risks.

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by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

How to Get Optimal Enterprise Physical Assert Utilization and Asset Performance

Getting excellent enterprise physical asset utilization and maximum asset performance needs business-wide and life-cycle-long coordination and cooperation.

By coordinating and merging business-wide data and asset historical performance records into useful asset information, you can make timely and informed decisions that safely and profitably maximize the performance and value contribution of your enterprise physical assets

To go down the path of getting operating asset optimization it is necessary that you first identify what measures will be used to determine the “optimal asset utilization” state.

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by Arun Gowtham Leave a Comment

Introduction: AI & Predictive Maintenance

If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about how new Digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Remote Data Sensing, and Industrial Automation apply to Reliability Engineering, then you’ve come to the right place.

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