Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

Christopher Jackson — Thought Leader

Author of Reliability in Emerging Technology, multiple books, co-host on Speaking of Reliability, and speaker in the Accendo Reliability Webinar Series.


This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

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What is a ‘Fault Tree’?

What is a ‘Fault Tree’?

What is a ‘Fault Tree’?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

If you have spent any amount of time doing reliability engineering stuff, you will probably have heard of this thing called a ‘fault tree.’ You may have even used fault trees a lot. But it is amazing how many different reliability engineers have different ideas about how to best use a fault tree. Some think fault trees are strictly used to work out which combinations of components need to fail in order for the system to fail (system reliability modelling). Others think fault trees are really useful for helping us work out what the causes of failure are (root cause analysis). Both people are right. So why do we get these competing schools of thought? Join us for this webinar to learn more about how fault trees can help you … regardless of what you are trying to achieve.
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What do you see in a ‘Probability’ Plot?

What do you see in a ‘Probability’ Plot?

What do you see in a ‘Probability’ Plot?

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Some of you might have heard about probability plots … like Weibull plots. Some of you might not. A Weibull plot is a really useful way of quickly ‘looking’ at data and being able to ‘see’ really useful things. This could be seeing that the rate of failure of a system is decreasing over time … which usually means there are manufacturing defects. It could be seeing that the rate of failure of a system is increasing over time … which means the system is accumulating damage or wearing out. And lots of other things. So let’s look at a different sort of ‘probability’ plot … and see what we can work out from it. And that means working out what we need to do to improve reliability. Join this webinar if you want to learn how to see really useful things in lines that you might not have appreciated in the past.
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Confidence in Reliability

Confidence in Reliability

Confidence in Reliability

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Reliability is a measure of your product or system. Confidence is a measure of you. But we often forget this. We often subject our new product, system or service to test after test until it reaches this thing called ‘required statistical confidence.’ But this is often an illusion. Which is great! Because if statistical confidence is often not ‘real’ confidence, then we don’t always have to resort to statistics to get confidence. In fact, those of us who exclusively rely on statistics are usually those who lack confidence in the product, system or service and need a security blanket to make them feel OK. This webinar talks about confidence from the perspective of the ‘process owner.’ The design team lead. The CTO. The junior engineer. And how you can get a much healthier version of confidence through the way we design and produce our ‘things’ so that when it comes time to test … we are (justifiably) supremely confident that we will absolutely dominate whatever statistical testing hurdle can be thrown our way. And this sometimes means we don’t need to deal with statistics at all!
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Basic Mathematical Symbols and Stuff

Basic Mathematical Symbols and Stuff

Basic Mathematical Symbols and Stuff

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

OK … we have all been there. We have all sat in some statistical presentation or read a document that contains mathematical symbols and statistical hieroglyphics that we don’t understand. And we pretend we do understand just so we don’t embarrass ourselves. And the people we don’t want to embarrass ourselves in front of are usually also pretending to understand those symbols and hieroglyphics as well. This webinar is a light (re)introduction into common mathematical symbols used in many engineering scenarios … including reliability. [Read more…]

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How to Take the Guess Work out of Expert Judgment

How to Take the Guess Work out of Expert Judgment

How to Take the Guess Work out of Expert Judgment

podcast episode with speaker Chris Jackson

Most humans can be quite technically minded. And sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes we expect every drug or medical procedure to be checked, approved, validated, tested on other people (et cetera) before we subject ourselves to whatever it is our doctor suggests. And other times we spend lots of money at casinos (note that I said ‘spend’ and not ‘invest’ or ‘win’). When it comes to reliability, we can sometimes be too technically minded. A reliability ‘number’ might not exist until our product has gone through exhaustive testing. Which can often be two years too late to do anything about if it turns out it doesn’t meet all our reliability dreams. So what can we do? Well … why spend money drying to generate information (through lengthy test) when you can just use the information stored in everyone’s brain? The most common answer (even if we don’t want to admit it) is that this sounds a lot like guess work. And guess work can sounds unprofessional. Or just wrong. But there are ways you can suck out information from a group of experts in a quantifiable and remarkably accurate way. Want to learn more? This webinar introduces you to some of the concepts that might interest you.
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