QDD Redux: How to self-advocate for more customer face time (and why it’s important)

We’ve been talking about how to best work with our cross-functional team at early concept development – to use quality and reliability tools in working meetings to really understand the concept space as a way to design for how the customer may experience our new concept idea.

Coming out of our talks make be questions about unknowns or misalignments. We may need to meet our customers where they’re at to get clarity.

When engineers say, “I’d like to talk with a customer about this,” we usually get push-back.

We need to tackle objections and remove obstacles between design engineers and their customers. For ideas, I’ve pulled an episode from the archive, originally published December 2021.

Listen-in to learn how we can take next steps in the concept space when visiting customers.

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Engineering with Receptivity, with Sol Rosenbaum (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

Dianna Deeney interviews Sol Rosenbaum about engineering with receptivity: how an openness toward others for new impressions and different ideas can lead to a successful engineering career.

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 within engineering projects.

About Sol

Sol Rosenbaum graduated with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering and is currently the Owner & Managing Engineer of a small firm providing engineering support and energy analysis to commercial properties as part of the mortgage financing process. He also has a passion for mentoring younger engineers and founded The Engineering Mentor where he provides material geared towards younger engineers and helping them along in their engineering journey.

Sol and Dianna talk about:

• Differences in project work, in seeing things through from project start-to-finish or becoming an expert in one aspect of a project.
• How new technologies make things more efficient, and how an understanding of the underlying basics is needed, too.
• The importance of showing up with openness and humility.
• What types of things experienced engineers can do to help less experienced engineers.
• How less experienced engineers can approach teamwork and their important contributions.

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Don’t Wish for Cross-Functional Buy-in on Product Designs – Plan to Get It!

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

We take these wishes…
“I wish I had the cross functional input that I need for design inputs.”
“I wish I could work with my cross functional team.”
“I wish my team would accept my design idea.”

…and we add a plan to make them a GOAL.

We plan for what it is we want and how we’re going to get there using Quality during Design.

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Before You Start Engineering Solutions, Do This

We’re given information about an opportunity for a new product.

We talk about what can happen when we start solution-building just with what we’re given. And we talk about an alternative start to a new engineering project.

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QDD Redux Ep. 4: Statistical vs. Practical Significance

In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we’re pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis.

In our Season 1 – Episode 93  titled “The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering”, we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques.

When we’re looking at results (like measures of a characteristic), we need to take care not to get too hung-up on what the statistics is trying to tell us. Yes, statistical tools are a good way for us to make decisions and the results can act as proof for us. But, there’s a practical, engineering side to results, too. We need to evaluate the statistical significance along with the practical significance.

We review an example and how to document it.

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QDD Redux Ep. 3: When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

When trying to fit a probability distribution to quantitative results, sometimes the normal probability doesn’t fit. Minitab has a wealth of distributions to pick from. Do you just pick whichever one Minitab tells you fits the best? Maybe not. Just because the distribution fits your data doesn’t mean it’s a good one to use. We review my top 3 distributions for product testing and some other ones that come up but may not be appropriate to use.

We’ll also share what you need to think about when picking a distribution:

1. think about your purpose of test
2. consider your failure mode and how you’re expecting your product to perform – does the typical use case of a distribution fit?
3. when you have options, the simpler the distribution the  better (i.e. choose a 2-parameter over a 3-parameter)

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QDD Redux Ep. 2: How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

SHOW NOTES

In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we’re pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis.

Originally released May 2021. We talk about the importance of examining failure modes plus other topics.

If we’re not careful with or ignore failure modes, we can choose the wrong reliability model or statistical distribution. If our product performance is close to the required limits and/or we need a very accurate model, this could be a big problem.

We talk about the importance of failure modes and step-through a tensile-test example to explore these other topics:

• competing failure modes
• suspensions
• independent vs. dependent
• reliability block diagrams

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QDD Redux Ep. 1: How Many Do We Need to Test?

SHOW NOTES

In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we’re pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis.

In our Season 1 episode titled “The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering”, we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques.

The next 4 episodes of this QDD Redux are taking the next steps.

In this episode we review sampling for design tests. We talk through a generic thought process for choosing a statistically relevant sample size and propose some basics that we can all learn about to better understand sampling.

Our goal is for us to be able to better talk through a sampling scenario with our quality and reliability engineering friends, and to better prepare for the information that they’re going to want to know when asked, “How many do we need to test?”

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The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering

A quiz:

What statistical concept is used in these design activities?

• DOE (design of experiments)
• Sampling
• Test results analysis
• Gage R&R studies
• Test method validations
• SPC (with some rules in monitoring changes in a process)

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What to do for Effective and Efficient Working Meetings

We all like effective and efficient working meetings.

What do we do to plan them, or how do we improve our recurring ones?

Are we prepared to do things differently? If so, we can collect information so we know what we want to improve and by how much.

We talk about best practices of meeting evaluations for those that we plan and facilitate and those recurring team meetings.

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Get Design Inputs with Flowcharts

How do we even begin a design for the user without getting into engineering prototypes?

Don’t we need to do lots of iterations of prototypes and physical mockups to get design inputs from other people?

While these things can be useful, they’re not always practical or necessary, No, we don’t need to do lots of iterations of different mockups to get design inputs.

In fact, we want to explore the use space with our team before we even start engineering stuff, including the mockups. So how do we get started talking with our team about a design concept without having something to show them?

This episode describes just one way we could do it: how to get design inputs with flowcharts.

If you want more on this topic, register for the workshop! Registration Link

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Quality Tools are Legos of Development (and Their 7 Uses)

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.

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Lessons Learned from Coffee Pod Stories

What types of things might happen when we don’t fully understand, explore, or address:

• the breadth of the whole concept space,
• a product’s many users, and
• the voice of the customer?

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.

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Crucial Conversations in Engineering, with Shere Tuckey (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

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.

About Shere

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 and Dianna talk about:

• what makes a dialogue a Crucial Conversation®
• how she discovered the Crucial Conversation® framework
• why she trains others at her work in the Crucial Conversations® model and champions its use

Shere also shares stories of success.

Listen to take your communications skills to another level, at work and everywhere else.

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Challenges Getting Team Input in Concept Development

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:

• Changing our scope to a closed world, to failures or questions, or design heuristics
• Brainstorming within a problem-solving framework
• Grouping many ideas and then further refining them
• Prioritizing many ideas by comparing them to 2 criteria or by using team voting
• Choosing an idea by using paired comparisons or a structured decision-making solution like DMRCS
• Giving individuals a process to create a full design concept

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.

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