What Price Providing MTBF?

If your livelihood consists of providing MTBF upon request, what good is your service?

Sure you earn some money, yet did the customer receive value in the transaction? As you know, or should know, MTBF is so commonly misunderstood that it is likely the customer confused what they want, reliability, with MTBF. Providing them MTBF does not answer their question.

Worse the customer thinks they got something of value and blithely heads off with rather meaningless information.

My contention is by providing MTBF because customer’s request it is wrong. We know better. Those performing predictions, doing data analysis, and other reliability engineering work know that MTBF is a faulty and rather meaningless metric often confused with reliability, R(t). (probability of success over a duration). [Read more…]