Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Effectively communicating system redundancy is important because redundancy touches system performance, risk management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance, and customer & owner confidence. Getting the redundancy communication wrong produces blind spots and surprises. Getting it right produces a well-oiled, predictable machine. This article provides proven tips for effectively communicating system redundancy.
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Redundancy in facilities and critical infrastructure is often misunderstood as simply having two of something. However, redundancy is a sophisticated strategy used by systems and reliability engineers to minimize failures and ensure continuous operation. It is one of several approaches to preventing system failures and comes with several key tradeoffs. This article examines four key aspects, or the four horsemen, of redundancy and why it is so important for facilities and critical infrastructure.
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Reliability engineers are challenged to effectively communicate their technical information to senior managers and the public. The FINESSE fishbone diagram is a proven, systems-based approach for meeting the communications challenge. The first E in the FINESSE fishbone diagram stands for Empathy. These are four tips to help you improve your empathy and empathetic listening.
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In the upcoming months, look for an article on each of the seven bones of the FINESSE fishbone diagram. I’ll provide three insights and a three-minute video on each bone. You’ll see the cause-and-effect relationships and why communication is a system just like any other type of physical system. The series is a good introduction for those unfamiliar with FINESSE and a refresher for those who are.
A system is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, each of which can affect the behavior or outcomes of the whole. One defining property of a system is that it provides a function that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves. The corollary is that a system is not the sum of the parts but the product of their interactions.
A communication system is the same as any other system. The good news for technical professionals is that you do not have the best-looking, most eloquent, or smartest person in the room to be an effective communicator. You just need to trust the system.
