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Post by Phaedrus on Jun 1, 2019 20:17:28 GMT -5
I have been in the machine manufacturing world for almost all of my engineering career and I have experienced the evolution of project management to a certain extent, I was more on the analysis side rather than the design side. One thing that I had noticed is that the project managers have a habit of deliberately compartmentalizing design functions. The idea is that in a large and complex design project it is almost impossible for a few people to keep an eye on every single detail so it critical that they have many people involved in designing parts of the final product and that they are able to plug people into the different design functions like interchangeable parts, almost symbolic of the product itself. Concomitantly, it also work to the advantage of the management that they can treat people like interchangeable parts, thereby making engineering design into a commodity, allowing them to drive cost down. But by doing so, they are also creating communication silos within a project. The communication task is left up to the project manager, who may or may not be a seasoned engineer. This is where the breakdown in essential communications happen.
Good project managers will overcompensate for this unintended consequence by creating layers of meetings to update everyone but especially themselves on the daily status of the project. But it wouldn't surprise me that the silo effect could result in causing the decision to go to a single sensor to slip through the cracks.
I am not of course saying that this is what happened or that this is what is happening at Boeing, but that possibility looms large in my mind.
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Post by ironhammer on Jun 1, 2019 20:45:02 GMT -5
I have been in the machine manufacturing world for almost all of my engineering career and I have experienced the evolution of project management to a certain extent, I was more on the analysis side rather than the design side. One thing that I had noticed is that the project managers have a habit of deliberately compartmentalizing design functions. The idea is that in a large and complex design project it is almost impossible for a few people to keep an eye on every single detail so it critical that they have many people involved in designing parts of the final product and that they are able to plug people into the different design functions like interchangeable parts, almost symbolic of the product itself. Concomitantly, it also work to the advantage of the management that they can treat people like interchangeable parts, thereby making engineering design into a commodity, allowing them to drive cost down. But by doing so, they are also creating communication silos within a project. The communication task is left up to the project manager, who may or may not be a seasoned engineer. This is where the breakdown in essential communications happen. Good project managers will overcompensate for this unintended consequence by creating layers of meetings to update everyone but especially themselves on the daily status of the project. But it wouldn't surprise me that the silo effect could result in causing the decision to go to a single sensor to slip through the cracks. I am not of course saying that this is what happened or that this is what is happening at Boeing, but that possibility looms large in my mind. I am aware of the silo effect, but it is the responsibility of the managers, whether it is the project manager, or his superiors, to know how all the little bits fit together. Thy need to have the big picture as well as the details. They have to keep on top of things even if those in the "trenches" are only focused on specific parts, the managers must know how the jigsaw fits together. Clearly this has not been the case with MAX, something fell through the cracks. The managers are liable here I think.
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Post by Phaedrus on Jun 1, 2019 21:51:38 GMT -5
My point is that the silo-ing is intended function for the project manager in order to, as I said, to commoditize engineering design. They then have to work their asses off to prevent the communications breakdown. If they weren't so intent on making design so compartmentalized the silo effect wouldn't be so acute.
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Post by ironhammer on Jun 1, 2019 22:58:50 GMT -5
My point is that the silo-ing is intended function for the project manager in order to, as I said, to commoditize engineering design. They then have to work their asses off to prevent the communications breakdown. If they weren't so intent on making design so compartmentalized the silo effect wouldn't be so acute. I get that, I am saying it is their job at the top to keep the big picture, so that they don't get into a situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
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Post by ironhammer on Jun 27, 2019 8:19:56 GMT -5
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Post by Phaedrus on Jun 27, 2019 9:37:58 GMT -5
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Post by Phaedrus on Sept 21, 2019 15:04:49 GMT -5
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Post by ironhammer on Sept 24, 2019 22:45:01 GMT -5
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Post by mikegarrison on Sept 25, 2019 1:10:59 GMT -5
Only the safety and certification engineering groups, I think. It's kind of complicated. There are "programs", like 787 or 777X, but there are also functional engineering groups like Aero or Noise that don't directly work for any program but work on all of them. And then there is Sales and Marketing, which is completely separate. And Customer Engineering, which is also completely separate.
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Post by akbar on Sept 25, 2019 12:22:34 GMT -5
Boeing to pay $144,500 to each family for loved ones lost.
Wonder what the value would be if they were American lives.
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Post by mikegarrison on Sept 25, 2019 12:25:53 GMT -5
Boeing to pay $144,500 to each family for loved ones lost. Wonder what the value would be if they were American lives. Is there any dollar value that would have not led you to make this pithy statement? Oh, and by the way, some of the passengers on Ethiopian 302 were Americans.
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Post by Phaedrus on Sept 25, 2019 14:37:20 GMT -5
My old company, not the immediate past company but the one before that, just nuked the engineering organization and put all of engineering under businesses. It is a hot mess.
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Post by akbar on Sept 25, 2019 14:41:39 GMT -5
Boeing to pay $144,500 to each family for loved ones lost. Wonder what the value would be if they were American lives. Is there any dollar value that would have not led you to make this pithy statement? Oh, and by the way, some of the passengers on Ethiopian 302 were Americans. Actually its a legit question and the information has precedent and interesting arguements for litigation. The "value" is one that a number has generally been figured out There are links to these questions for victims. Perhaps it was pithy www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/08D62B54-D3E7-11E4-83FA-7B9EF38B3BFBThe amount of damages that each passenger will receive will most likely depend on the law of the country of origin of each of the passengers, says William Angelley, aviation attorney at Braden, Varner & Angelley in Dallas, Texas. The Montreal Convention provides for a “fifth jurisdiction” so victims or their families can sue foreign carriers in the country where they maintain their principal residence. “In the U.S., those numbers tend to be higher than in other parts of the world,” Angelley says. “So the Germans will receive whatever German law allows and the Spanish passengers will receive whatever Spanish law allows, and so forth.”
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Post by tomclen on Oct 8, 2019 10:34:02 GMT -5
Money.
The notion that big corporate interests control everything is nothing new. Reagan said, "Government's not the solution, Government is the problem." He didn't really believe that, but it's what the corporate interests wanted to hear.
Now, government agencies are being dismantled. Literally.
Since they couldn't just wipe out important regulation and research parts of the USDA, they just ordered it moved to Kansas. Hundreds of employees decided to leave rather than move. Dismantling mission accomplished.
Department of Education has been gutted. The EPA is being run by a man who bragged about wanting to eliminate the EPA.
Consumer protections are being eliminated. Some cities and towns no longer have water that's safe to drink. Big companies are either dumping harmful chemicals into the water and ground, or they're putting them in plastic containers that you buy to spray on your lawn.
The big corporate interests are getting what they want, and you really can't do anything about it.
The FAA is a government agency that helped create airline safety that is a world model. But Boeing was essentially doing it's own inspections and real government inspectors were bypassed.
Costs were saved. Corners were cut. People died.
DM me when someone goes to jail. Otherwise, a multi-billion-dollar company will pay a fine of a couple hundred thousand dollars. The cutting will continue. These government agencies will never recover.
And you and I will salute the flag, pay our taxes, mail in our ballot, say "thank you for your service", while corporate fat cats will, at the very least, rob us blind - and may just kill us.
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Post by mikegarrison on Oct 8, 2019 14:14:18 GMT -5
tomclen, it's not that simple. Money and schedule and Airbus forcing Boeing's hand caused Boeing to decide to make a derivative of the 737 instead of an all-new small single-aisle airplane. Once that happened, Boeing was committed to keeping as much of the airplane as possible the same as the old 737. This is a standard method of airplane design, which has been done for about a century. The assumption is that since the old airplane is proven safe, then the new one will be too. See the article that Phaedrus posted above. It goes into great detail, all of which is correct as far as I know it. The most crucial mistakes that were made in the design and certification were 1) Boeing following the existing FAA guidance on the expected response of the pilots (yes, the existing FAA guidance -- not something that was specially made up to save money for the 737), 2) Boeing not anticipating that they needed to limit the operation of this MCAS because they expected the pilots would just turn it off if there was a problem (see point 1), and 3) Boeing deciding (and the FAA agreeing) that MCAS didn't need to be specifically added to the training because if it ever triggered wrongly, it was expected the pilots would just turn the trim motors off as they are already trained to do (again see point 1). The fact that on a Lion Air flight the day before the fatal crash, pilots did in fact just turn it off and safely completed the flight argues that this was not unreasonable. However, the fact that two separate crews did not respond as expected argues that the expectations for pilot response were wrong. I repeat again, however, that the expected response of the pilots was not something new. It was existing guidance. Airplanes have to be designed with some expectation of what the pilots will do. For instance, your car is not designed to prevent a rollover if you turn the wheel as hard to the side as possible when you are going 100 miles per hour. I guarantee you will have a bad outcome if you try this, but there is a reasonable expectation that a driver will not do it. Everyone involved has now learned that whether or not the expected pilot response was ever correct, it can no longer be assumed to be correct now. Even after specific guidance on how to handle an MCAS problem was released following the first crash, a second flight crew still got so confused that they crashed the plane. So the system has had to be redesigned with a new expectation of how the pilots will respond. Pilot training will also be changed. Very little or maybe none of this has anything to do with Boeing or the FAA being evil or corrupt or saving money at the expense of safety. Probably the closest thing to that was the basic decision right from the start to make this a derivative airplane instead of an all-new one. And yet, that's actually a safety tradeoff. An all-new airplane can incorporate new safety systems, but keeping things the same for an already safe product has obvious safety benefits too. In this case, no one understood the entire implications of how adding this one system would change the safety environment of the airplane. ps. Boeing has already announced a five billion dollar loss due to this, so "a multi-billion-dollar company will pay a fine of a couple hundred thousand dollars" is way off the mark.
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