Christopher Jackson — Thought Leader

Good business isn’t knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing

(Association) football (or ‘soccer’ in some countries) is the world’s most popular sport. Most professional leagues (especially in Europe) have different tiers of competition where the bottom performers of one tier are ‘relegated’ to the next tier down at the end of each season, while the top performers of each tier are ‘promoted’ to the next tier up. This means that any club could feasibly work its way to the top tier of every league. [Read more…]

a breath of fresh air or something that has always been blowing in the wind?

Let’s just say you owned a house with a garden so big that you need someone to look after it for you. So, you find a professional gardener. And (because you have just graduated from a contract management course), you ask your gardener to sign a ‘traditional contract.’

A ‘traditional contract’ means (at least in this post) a contract with hundreds of clauses supposed to cover every possible future scenario. Do you host garden parties and want your gardener to spend 8 hours on your garden in the preceding week? There needs to be a clause for that. What happens if the gardener is sick? What happens if you don’t want the gardener in your garden between 2pm and 4 pm on Tuesdays because you have clarinet practice? What happens if your clarinet practice changes? What if you have 3 feet of snow? What flowers do you want planted in the spring? Our ‘traditional contract’ needs clauses for every scenario. [Read more…]

One of the more overlooked elements of leadership is explained direction. This is where leaders take the time to describe (in a tailored, personal way) to everyone how their individual efforts directly contribute to organizational success.

The leader of course first needs to have a clear idea of what success and a strategy to get there (otherwise how can they know how you or I are an important part of getting there?) People appreciate when leaders explain to them how their HR, design review, testing and quality assurance efforts directly create value. This helps motivate, measuring achievement and all sorts of other good stuff. [Read more…]

Let’s say that someone has decided they want to get better at something. Perhaps they want to lose weight. Perhaps they want to learn a language. Perhaps they want to learn to play the guitar.

The next thing they might do is find an expert who can help them. A personal trainer. A linguist. A music teacher. They then go and find their expert. But … in the very first meeting, they tell their expert:

‘Just so you know, I am NOT going to (1) stop eating hamburgers, (2) do homework or (3) practice playing.’ [Read more…]

In one of my recent webinars on ‘reliability culture,’ I was asked a really good question. Someone (let’s call him ‘Tim’) asked me:

How do I get the most out of my ‘ad hoc’ reliability team?

Tim had recently created a ‘reliability team’ made up of people from different areas of his organization. These people were smart, qualified, but had non-reliability engineering day jobs. They weren’t qualified reliability engineers. They weren’t idiots. And they couldn’t devote all their time to reliability. [Read more…]

I often talk to engineers who have just been told that they are now a ‘reliability guy or girl’ for their organization. The CEO or perhaps a director decides that reliability is now important, so a group of poor unfortunates are hastily and collectively anointed as ‘the’ reliability program. Is this familiar?

Sometimes this works. Sometimes these rebranded ‘reliability guys and girls’ create amazing programs that [Read more…]

Reliability engineering has an image problem. It is seen as an imbugerance that destroys budget, schedule and fun. People sometimes think reliability engineering is simply statistics, data analysis and other mind-numbing stuff. Reliability purgatory. Which brings us to the first reason you need to do reliability engineering.

#1 – Reliability engineering is not reliability purgatory. Reliability purgatory is all effort and no outcomes. Reliability happens at the point of decision. Design decisions. Manufacturing decisions. Maintenance decisions. True reliability engineering helps you make better decisions – which often comes down to organized judgment and not statistics.

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A recent student of mine was an engineer for a rail corporation. Let’s call her Liz. Liz kept asking me ‘what do I need to put in a contract’ to make sure my suppliers take reliability seriously? She kept asking this over, and over, until I got the penny to drop. Liz eventually realized that she was the one who had to take it seriously. [Read more…]

Remember how we were told as kids in school that we had to study hard to get into college or university? There was that ongoing, implied threat that not getting into university or college would ruin our career. Or at least, be very bad.

It turns out it may not be that bad after all. For example, over half of Apple’s employees don’t have 4-year degrees. Why? [Read more…]

Every organization needs to be able to explain ‘why’ it is here. In fact, an organization’s ‘why’ is . Check out Simon Sinek. One of his favourite phrases is that ‘people don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it.’

People buy Apple products because of they enjoy how they interface with devices that are part of a bigger and seamless ecosystem. All their competitors try to emulate this. Amazon is all about customer experience. [Read more…]

This is our fifth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. We have been taken on a journey through the reliability design cycle, key steps for reliability allocation, allocation factors used to get these goals and key pitfalls. Now we finish off our conversation by looking at a few variations and applications. Allocating MTBF (… though we recommend against it), allocating availability, allocating maintainability (… another thing we recommend against) and allocating for different system reliability goals.

If you want to finish off your understanding of reliability allocation – read this!

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This is our fourth article about the 3 ways to do reliability allocation. The first three articles describe the reliability design cycle and how reliability allocation is a part of this cycle. Our last article focused on what options you, as a design team leader, have at your disposal when you realize that your components aren’t on track to meet their allocated goals (or doing something!) Now we talk about working out what these allocated goals are. And how to get them. And don’t worry – it is much easier than you probably think!

If you want to learn more about a straightforward approach to reliability allocation – read this!

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