Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss accelerated testing. Accelerated testing is great for getting lots of information in a short period of time. You can compress a lot of ‘real-time’ life into a really small amount of testing. But how do you do it right? You need to understand the underlying physics of failure to work out how the compression of time works.
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Let’s just say you owned a house with a garden so big that you need someone to look after it for you. So, you find a professional gardener. And (because you have just graduated from a contract management course), you ask your gardener to sign a ‘traditional contract.’
A ‘traditional contract’ means (at least in this post) a contract with hundreds of clauses supposed to cover every possible future scenario. Do you host garden parties and want your gardener to spend 8 hours on your garden in the preceding week? There needs to be a clause for that. What happens if the gardener is sick? What happens if you don’t want the gardener in your garden between 2pm and 4 pm on Tuesdays because you have clarinet practice? What happens if your clarinet practice changes? What if you have 3 feet of snow? What flowers do you want planted in the spring? Our ‘traditional contract’ needs clauses for every scenario. [Read more…]
Everyone knows why we do reliability, and reliability things like FMEAs. Customer experience. Organization reputation. Reduced warranty claims 10 years from now. But these are boring reasons that really don’t motivate me to take FMEAs seriously now. Why should I invest so much time into an activity that benefits the ‘company’ or the ‘customer’ in the future but won’t make an immediate difference when my boss will give me a ‘gold star’ on my next performance appraisal? Right? Wrong! [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss what it means to be ‘deterministic’ versus ‘probabilistic’ … and what that means for reliability engineering. Know what these words mean and want to learn more? Don’t know what these words mean and want to understand how they could help reliability engineering? Listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss how you go about ‘hunting’ reliability training. And we do mean ‘hunt.’
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One of the enduring beauties and mysteries of reliability engineering is that there is no straight forward definition of who a reliability engineer is. Proactive, successful organizations, employ reliability engineers in many different and tailored ways. Reactive, ‘barely solvent’ organizations use reliability engineers as over-qualified auditors, expected to clap system configurations through design review gates as quickly and quietly as possible.
So what does this mean for you and your reliability engineering career? Are you in a position now that you are not entirely happy with? Are you in an industry on a downward trend … meaning that sooner or later you need to move to a greener pasture? Or do you want to become a better version of yourself and feel more valued than you currently do? [Read more…]
One of the more overlooked elements of leadership is explained direction. This is where leaders take the time to describe (in a tailored, personal way) to everyone how their individual efforts directly contribute to organizational success.
The leader of course first needs to have a clear idea of what success and a strategy to get there (otherwise how can they know how you or I are an important part of getting there?) People appreciate when leaders explain to them how their HR, design review, testing and quality assurance efforts directly create value. This helps motivate, measuring achievement and all sorts of other good stuff. [Read more…]
Let’s say that someone has decided they want to get better at something. Perhaps they want to lose weight. Perhaps they want to learn a language. Perhaps they want to learn to play the guitar.
The next thing they might do is find an expert who can help them. A personal trainer. A linguist. A music teacher. They then go and find their expert. But … in the very first meeting, they tell their expert:
‘Just so you know, I am NOT going to (1) stop eating hamburgers, (2) do homework or (3) practice playing.’ [Read more…]
Chris and Fred discuss how to become a reliability engineering consultant. This is a very natural question for a lot of us. It might be easy to visualize what you want to achieve. But it can be daunting to get there.
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Chris and Fred discuss how you go about setting a reliability goal. We got asked by someone who was responsible for a ‘complex’ system …
How reliable does our system need to be?
Unfortunately … you need to tell us that! Hopefully this webinar will help you start asking the right question to work it out for yourself.
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Well, we are going COTS, so there is no point creating (or demanding) reliability specifications for it.
Really?
I was just speaking to a couple of engineers – from different organizations – who were coincidentally struggling with the reliability of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) systems. COTS is a funny term. Big contractors, governmental organizations and militaries use the term ‘COTS’ a lot. But they tend to be the only ones who do. [Read more…]
In one of my recent webinars on ‘reliability culture,’ I was asked a really good question. Someone (let’s call him ‘Tim’) asked me:
How do I get the most out of my ‘ad hoc’ reliability team?
Tim had recently created a ‘reliability team’ made up of people from different areas of his organization. These people were smart, qualified, but had non-reliability engineering day jobs. They weren’t qualified reliability engineers. They weren’t idiots. And they couldn’t devote all their time to reliability. [Read more…]
There are so many books on leadership, management, more leadership, reliability, quality, customer first, even more leadership, et cetera. But there remains a common refrain I hear repeatedly from reliability engineers struggling to make a difference: ‘Reliability is just not relevant to my organization.’ There is a common thread to this common refrain – we only hear it from people who work in organizations that don’t have a clear understanding of ‘why’ they are doing what they do.
A common refrain from managers and engineers alike (as it relates to making or maintaining reliable products) is:
How do we know if we are there yet?
This makes reliability engineering sound like driving a car, sanding a piece of wood, mowing the lawn, or any other endeavour where efforts perfectly align with progress.
This doesn’t work for reliability. Reliability can be easy to achieve, but it needs to be thought about in a different way. And when you do, everything becomes easier. [Read more…]
I often talk to engineers who have just been told that they are now a ‘reliability guy or girl’ for their organization. The CEO or perhaps a director decides that reliability is now important, so a group of poor unfortunates are hastily and collectively anointed as ‘the’ reliability program. Is this familiar?
Sometimes this works. Sometimes these rebranded ‘reliability guys and girls’ create amazing programs that [Read more…]
