porschenut said:What is more frustrating then engineering changes? Getting locked in a room with a pin headed bean counter and interrogated into cost reductions. Result? Never meet the cost target, get beaten up quarterly for this and then going through 2 100% product recalls.
And then the dipE36 M3 know it alls blame the "stupid engineers". As if the engineers ruled the whole process.
SV reX said:11 detention ponds
Is that where the people who do bad engineering need to spend their Saturdays ?! Kidding ...
In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :
Haha! Actually, that was a typo. They are retention ponds (which are different)
SV reX said:pres589 (djronnebaum) said:In reply to SV reX :
Did anyone try to explain to the CEO in that accounting story the issues that would drive, and ask for a later date to make that change?
Sure. But it didn't matter.
CEOs make deadlines on projects for a reason. 2 years before that moment he had made the deadline based on the fact that his primary season for sales was the 4th quarter and he needed his showroom done. 4th quarter sales represent 65% of his annual sales, and he literally needed it done so he could pay for the project. Plus, there were financing deadlines that would expire if the project went any longer.
We could complain about him being unreasonable, or we could figure out a way to get it done and be first in line for the next few projects he had planned.
Makes no sense to bitch about the hand that feeds you, even if he's not that reasonable.
We make things happen. He gives us work.
Im not in engineering but this isnt an engineering-only issue. it spans pretty much all industries. Ive been given seemingly dumb deadlines and Ive handed them out. Im sure there are unreasonable bosses and massive inefficiencies in businesses but in my experience, the "this is unreasonable" sentiment stems from a lack of the seeing entire picture, and most times people dont need to see the whole picture its not their job that what the boss, CEO or project manager does. When I read the accounting story and it was mentioned that a crew was needed 24/7 the first thing I thought was "sounds like it got done" so it was possible.
Im sure my guys think i do dumb stuff (sometimes i do) a bunch and my deadlines or expectations are too high or too tight, but its always for a reason, and they are paid well for doing what they do. Armchair managing is easy with the benefit of hindsight, but its not so easy to be the guy that has to forecast and predict all the moving parts with the health of the business and people's livelihoods on the line.
SV reX said:In reply to Scotty Con Queso :
We are working from plans to build the 2000 acres of building pad for over 16 million square feet of buildings which include NO utilities, storm drainage, or building designs.
11 detention ponds, 3 1/2 miles of frontage road, and a rail yard, and it's all gonna have to be redone when they figure out what they want to build and where the buildings are going.
and if they're still selling product like they thought to warrant this exercise
In reply to Opti :
I totally agree with you. I didn't mean to be criticizing the CEO, I was saying that his decisions may not make sense to people who don't know the details.
Lots of folks don't like the fact that they don't know all the details.
SV reX said:In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :
Haha! Actually, that was a typo. They are retention ponds (which are different)
But, oddly enough, sort of the same concept
In reply to 759NRNG :
That's above my pay grade. WAAY above.
SV reX said:In reply to Opti :
I totally agree with you. I didn't mean to be criticizing the CEO, I was saying that his decisions may not make sense to people who don't know the details.
Lots of folks don't like the fact that they don't know all the details.
I realized I quoted you afterwards. I was agreeing with you
Pete. (l33t FS) said:SV reX said:In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :
Haha! Actually, that was a typo. They are retention ponds (which are different)
But, oddly enough, sort of the same concept
True!
I think technically our ponds are temporarily being used as retention ponds, but their permanent use is extremely large detention basins, but honestly I get them mixed up. They are basically built the same way.
All I know is we are supposed to dig big holes, and the actual runoff needs will be re-engineered later.
Mr_Asa said:How common is it for someone to decide to tweak something after a job has been put into production?
Third phase of this one job and on two of the phases either one of my coworkers or I have had to stop forward movement on other projects to get back into tweaking, sometimes literally as stuff gets ordered.
E36 M3 comes in wrong cause of all the hurry-up as we try to get the changes in and then we have to pause forward momentum again to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Its getting frustrating
It is super common for technical people to want things to be perfect. This is just a natural part of that process. Learn to enjoy the process and not get frustrated. Life is the journey.
In reply to Opti :
That's a best case scenario. Other times the bosses who 'knew better' than the technical community cost the company billions of dollars, the new bosses then make a big show about how 'we can't afford to do it the same way next time', but proceed to not really change their approach from the original cluster berkeley... Hypothetically speaking, of course. 
Not an engineer, but as a Technical Director, I feel the pain. I'm responsible for "engineering" and constructing theater sets along with all the electrical, audio, projections, etc that go with it. It's really no one's fault, they're all doing what they think is the best, but I get all kinds of crap.
I had a designer once who pulled his designs about 3 weeks before the show opened because he refused to concede that I wasn't able to span a 30' bridge on stage with nothing more than some "bent 2x6s." He was seemingly under the impression that all it takes was ANY curve to make any span indestructible. He even went as far as to show me pictures of various bridges with arrows pointing at the curvature of the structure.
And don't get me started on directors. They want what they want. Not their fault that they don't know what it takes. I just spent four days welding a custom platform that is 8' tall for an actor to be pushed around on only a 4' x 4' footprint. It took a day of calculating the total amount of counterweights and their positions to make sure the actor doesn't die being pushed around, a significant amount of time calculating the capacities of the steel I was using, sourcing sufficient rigging and safety harnesses to secure the actor, and another half a day to figure out what casters would take the weight and not sound like a freight train rolling on stage. The director's first thought? "I really hoped that someone could sit inside and push it around." My response? "Should have thought of that before the designs were finalized."
I'm fortunate that I'm a tech department of one. I have the final say, and there is no other contractor or other firm they can use, but the tomfoolery that I have to deny sometimes makes my head spin.
Driven5 said:In reply to Opti :
That's a best case scenario. Other times the bosses who 'knew better' than the technical community cost the company billions of dollars, the new bosses then make a big show about how 'we can't afford to do it the same way next time', but proceed to not really change their approach from the original cluster berkeley... Hypothetically speaking, of course.
I even conceded that there are unreasonable bosses and inefficiencies in business, but I do believe the majority of the time the bosses are doing things for a reason, and sometimes they are wrong. People are fallible. I believe most of the time the criticism and acting like something was so obvious with the benefit of hindsight is unfair. Everything in life is a compromise, we win some and we lose some. Engineers make mistakes to. No matter what your job is someone elses decisions will always make it more difficult, there is no escaping it, but they pay us to be there and if you decide the headache isnt worth the pay, renegotiate or go find another job, probably with most of the same headaches.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:porschenut said:What is more frustrating then engineering changes? Getting locked in a room with a pin headed bean counter and interrogated into cost reductions. Result? Never meet the cost target, get beaten up quarterly for this and then going through 2 100% product recalls.
And then the dipE36 M3 know it alls blame the "stupid engineers". As if the engineers ruled the whole process.
Yep. This is my frustration when ever a see a "stupid engineer" comment online.
There are absolutely are some stupid engineers. But damn if engineers aren't also taking the fall for sales, marketing, business development, strategy, purchasing, etc.
In reply to ProDarwin :
I enjoy the "stupid engineers" comment when someone is mad at a feature on their smart phone or mad that their car threw a check engine light at 60K (for the first ever non scheduled service). I like to sit back and wonder how far their chosen profession would have got in the design and manufacture of those items. Generally they would be lucky to have two soup cans and a string while they rode a scooter (because they couldn't make a bike).
ProDarwin said:Pete. (l33t FS) said:porschenut said:What is more frustrating then engineering changes? Getting locked in a room with a pin headed bean counter and interrogated into cost reductions. Result? Never meet the cost target, get beaten up quarterly for this and then going through 2 100% product recalls.
And then the dipE36 M3 know it alls blame the "stupid engineers". As if the engineers ruled the whole process.
Yep. This is my frustration when ever a see a "stupid engineer" comment online.
There are absolutely are some stupid engineers. But damn if engineers aren't also taking the fall for sales, marketing, business development, strategy, purchasing, etc.
Usually the business want drove the sales leg to quote cheap, to get profit the mfg cost needs to be lower and drug the engineering team to try and (poorly) execute on it at the last minute. Good engineers can take all the stupid engineers jokes in stride.
Engineers are not stupid people. As a group, they are some of the smartest people I know.
They get in trouble sometimes because they want to decouple their solutions from the costs. Then they blame the bean counters. Costs are always part of the problem to be solved.
They also tend to get stuck in single-solution thinking. There are always multiple solutions to a problem, and some cost more than others. Most engineers are pretty conservative (they don't want their solutions to fail), but conservative solutions are generally expensive ones. They tend to get stuck in the parameters that have been given them, and don't offer options.
We always avoid going back to the engineers, because engineering delays will kill a project quickly. But I understand enough about engineering to know when there is a better solution, and sometimes go back to the engineer with a different approach.
"Bean counters" (and consumers) can't do their job without being given options either.
ProDarwin said:Pete. (l33t FS) said:porschenut said:What is more frustrating then engineering changes? Getting locked in a room with a pin headed bean counter and interrogated into cost reductions. Result? Never meet the cost target, get beaten up quarterly for this and then going through 2 100% product recalls.
And then the dipE36 M3 know it alls blame the "stupid engineers". As if the engineers ruled the whole process.
Yep. This is my frustration when ever a see a "stupid engineer" comment online.
There are absolutely are some stupid engineers. But damn if engineers aren't also taking the fall for sales, marketing, business development, strategy, purchasing, etc.
I usually respond with "the engineer was probably given a budget of $5 and an order to reuse as much tooling as possible."
Change management. The people who follow it are more successful than those who don't. People think of great ideas too far into the process to adopt them. Ideas that should have been discussed during the initial brain storming sessions which started with lessons learned from previous projects where probably similar great ideas were already discussed. Just think of the disruption if the auto makers disrupted the release of a new model year because of some great idea. They wait until the next model or introduce the new idea later in the model year.
I'm kind of curious how change management works in industries with higher production rates than the one I work in. Where I've been it's basically, an engineering change request gets created (a funny number like 123456), and engineering gets created against that request number, and pretty early on in the project it's established on which finished product that changed/new engineering will be available. Life can happen so it might change as to which serial number unit the change is made or available on, or the whole thing might get cancelled before it goes to the line, but everything on the change can be traced back to that funny number. ECR 123456 adds a new clock radio to serial number 9876, here's the engineering created via that funny number, other engineering changes to existing drawings were checked out against that funny number, some documents were created against that funny number, and you can look the whole thing up in a database and such that ties it together.
I wonder how different that process looks in an automotive plant or consumer products, etc. My industry is highly regulated vs, say, a blender manufacturer. When they want to introduce a change in the control board in a blender, does a funny number in a database get utilized?
Every single change we make in the wind tunnel is a possible change to the build spec of the cars getting prepped to go to the track.
I work in a mostly prototype environment, so this is expected. In a mature production environment, there should not be any significant changes, unless raw materials become impossible to get or vendors cant supply sub-assemblies/parts. In between these is the limited production world and the early mass production scenario that requires changes to keep things moving and maturing the process/product.
Without changes my job would get really boring really fast.
SV reX said:Every single new project I've done in the past 12 years has been started before plans were complete. Preliminary site plans only- "Not for Construction".
INCLUDING the current one, which is a $5 BILLION project.
Concur with this. I don't recall the last, Design -> Bid -> Build job. They never work that anymore. Too much pressure to deliver projects in a faster and faster timeline. Site work is always started right after basic site programming is done, the rest can be figured out later. Everything is about time to market. In some market sectors, a day of delay in the client world can cost them hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars. There are certainly technological tools, alternate construction methodology techniques, off-site construction, modularization, etc that help. Unfortunately, time is still linear, haven't figured out that one yet :-(
SV reX said:Every single new project I've done in the past 12 years has been started before plans were complete. Preliminary site plans only- "Not for Construction".
INCLUDING the current one, which is a $5 BILLION project.
Quoted for truth but that doesn't make it right.
Not even close to the same order of magnitude money wise but I recently put a number on the HVAC for an animal research facility in a building that I'm really familiar with and have been involved with for over 10 years. The original "design development" drawings were dated from late April, I had reviewed them at the request of the facilities guys. The NY based GC who has the job put it out for bid with updated but still "DD" drawings that were dated from late August and were little changed from the ones from April. The GM of the building asked me to price it this time but to "fill in the blanks" ie: make allowances for what wasn't being shown.
That "missing scope" added up to about 2 million dollars on what in my estimation will end up being a 7 million dollar job. (HVAC) My overriding thought through the whole process was "you had 4 months, why aren't the drawings done?" Lots of room for shenanigans and someone is going to make a killing on change orders at the expense of the end user.
SV reX said:In reply to 759NRNG :
That's above my pay grade. WAAY above.
just keep movin' dirt.....
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