Reliability and Politics
Abstract
Chris and Fred discuss how reliability can sometimes be linked to politics (… at least in some way). Is this an experience you share?
Key Points
Join Chris and Fred as they discuss the role politics plays in reliability engineering and reliability endeavors. Because it is unfortunately prevalent …
Topics include:
- There is a ‘political caste of deadwood’ blocking good reliability engineering. Seriously. If you are a good reliability engineer in some company, you will hopefully be rewarded for your excellence. But then there are the people supposed to be ‘spreading the word.’ These are the university professors and the board of directors for reliability engineering conferences and symposia who are the gatekeepers for ‘what gets talked about.’ But if you know anything about universities and boards, you must slowly work your way up the political ladder to get there. And no ‘good’ reliability engineers have any time for this, leaving a toxic culture of mediocrity as people are more focused on prestige and control.
- And it’s not just reliability engineering. Many ‘senior’ people in organizations have become ‘senior’ because they are good at politics. Not necessarily good at engineering, designing, manufacturing or maintaining.
- … effort without outcomes – the first symptom of ‘politics’ supplanting ‘engineering.’ And this is because a political organization (by definition) is one where outcomes are measured in terms of personal gain, usually through organizational hierarchical rewards. It’s not about good outcomes. It’s about looking good for the power brokers who decide your fate in the organization. And if those power brokers are themselves the survivors of a political chain of progression … then you are in trouble!
- Politics destroys communication and creativity. If you have a good idea, and work in a political organization, then your idea needs to go to your boss to support or veto. Then he or she needs to go to his or her boss, attempte to re-explain your idea, to be supported or vetoed. Then it keeps going to the decision maker, perhaps weeks later, perhaps now completely misunderstood by the person explaining it, if it has not already been vetoed. Why? Because political organizations are all about individual promotion. And you speaking directly to the decision-maker does not help that.
- There will always be politics. But hopefully it is not toxic. And you know how to deal with it.
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1. I love the oboe lick from the Danzi Op. 87 No. 2(?) last movement that introduced this podcast. I’ll never play it that fast because the flute player would kill me.
2. Sorry to hear about the “deadwood blocking good reliability engineering.”
Something, ignorance?, is also blocking reliability statistics. Kirk Gray pointed out that “…actual field failure data, and the root causes of those failures can never be shared… Reliability data is some of the most confidential and sensitive data a manufacturer has.” “…there is no basis for applying statistical or probabilistic predictive methods.”
3. People quit sharing their ships and returns counts with me for free nonparametric field reliability estimates, without lifetime data, about the same time as COVID-19 started, year 2000.
4. EPICOR’s predecessor in 1993 went from auto parts’ actuarial demand forecasts from internal actuarial rate estimates, to “partnering with” http://www.smartcorp.com for time series analysis forecasts, because a manager didn’t understand statistics, to finally firing that manager in 2023 after he contracted with http://www.predii.com for AI.
5. Weibull software seems as popular as the 1960s [Kececioglu, Abernathy, Pratt & Whitney] despite the fact that warranties, preventive maintenance, product retirement, and end-of-life-support invalidate the smoothness of Weibull and the bathtub curve.
Where is the Reality in Reliability? Why are RAMS and ASQ RRD sponsoring introductory courses? Why were FMECA, RCM, and ??? dumbed down into armchair exercises with RPNs to avoid statistics and probabilities?
Quite a few things here Larry! There are a couple of things here. One thing that is always topical … is it the fault of the conferences/societies (RAMS, ASQ et cetera) or the customers who blindly look for the easiest, simplest, dumbest explanations for once useful activities that are now checkboxes! I am also not necessarily on the same page as you regarding the smoothness of Weibull and the bathtub curve. The Weibull distribution is a probability distribution (i.e. a concept) that we choose when and how to use. As is the bathtub curve. Using a single Weibull distribution to characterize lots of different failure mechanisms rarely works well. But it does work well if use it to model specific failure mechanisms we know about.
But anyway … people who don’t want to take reliability seriously look for the easiest ways of making it look like they are taking it seriously. Enter politics!