Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. We are constantly exposed to new and better products, services that are more efficient, and things that generally make our lives better.
But how long will they work for? … and will they be safe?
And we often get it wrong. Toyota vehicles of the early 2000s had a problem with their new electronic throttle control system that saw them accelerate without warning – reliability was not the priority it needed to be. But autonomous vehicles are perhaps faced with an over-abundance of caution bordering on trepidation, meaning that the 95 per cent of road deaths caused by human error are still happening as the technology ‘drives unused.’ And then there are the new products that you either never hear of or can barely remember because they barely worked long enough for customers to enjoy. Budding entrepreneurs forget that there is a difference between time to market and time to market acceptance.
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So what are we to do? The answer involves a healthy dose of historic ‘reliability-principles’ with a blend of tailored approaches that goes (well and truly) beyond a ‘checklist’ or ‘compliance’ approach. So how do we get that mix right? That is the question.
Because the people that make them lie.
Not ‘obvious’ lying where lightbulb manufacturers calculate one reliability number and deliberately choose to put another number on their lightbulb packaging. But ‘insidious’ lying where they deliberately choose to measure the wrong thing to get a better number.
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There might not ever be a better demonstration of the saying that …
… a fish rots from it’s head.
Boeing is responsible for the half-baked Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that was forced into its new 737 Max aircraft. This involved a decidedly awful attempt to convince the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that there was no need to subject said aircraft through all the checks and balances that you need to go through if it is in fact a brand-new and different type of plane. Which it was. This resulted in the deaths of 346 passengers and crew (along with plenty of claims that it was pilot error). And just to be clear, Boeing has since admitted that it’s employees defrauded the FAA during the original certification process – an admission it was not required to make if it was able to complete a three-year period of increased monitoring and reporting. Which it could not.
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A simple way of looking at our brain is by dividing it into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind is all about what we are actively thinking about in the here and now. We might be navigating as we drive through the countryside. We might decide to take an exit from the main road because our conscious mind has worked out that the map we are looking at is showing us that’s what we need to do to get to where we want to go.
When I was a bright eyed, motivated (younger) officer in the Australian Army, one my many tasks when deployed overseas was to raise paperwork to formally request ‘battlefield material’ to be sent back home from whatever country we were in. ‘Battlefield material’ was items that included a range of mementos, keepsakes, and things you would typically see in a museum to add to the historical collections of my battalions and regiments back home.
For thousands of years, doctors treated virtually every skin ailment by ‘letting’ or draining the blood of the patient. Leeches are really good at doing this as they quite literally drink up the allegedly ‘poisoned’ blood that is being removed. Of course, by the late 1800s, science had advanced to the point where it was realized that this was nonsense, and so leeches fell out of favour in the world of medicine.
But that same scientific revolution saw the development of drugs like heroin and cocaine to cure everything from schizophrenia through to children’s cough. With doctors prescribing these drugs left right and centre, and worldwide epidemic of drug-addiction misery was spawned.
[Read more…]It is no small irony that a software application that is designed to protect IT systems from malicious actors was behind the biggest IT outage in the history of computers. A company called Crowdstrike provides a ‘Falcon Sensor’ product that is intended to scan computers that use Microsoft operating systems for vulnerabilities. And this product is deployed so deeply into its host operating systems that it has access to the ‘kernel,’ which is the program that runs the basic code that links applications to the computer hardware (like memory, central processing unit and other devices). Unfortunately a Falcon Sensor update that Crowdstrike sent to its customers had a bug that was not picked up by its own validation programs (because it too had a bug). And unfortunately, it accesses a ‘forbidden’ part of the memory that causes the infamous BSOD or ‘blue screen of death.’ So airlines, hospitals, banks, hotels and lots of other companies simply couldn’t operate.
How heavy should you be? Perhaps this is a sensitive question. The average weight of a human is about 65.2 kg or 143.7 lbs. So if your weight is above this figure, are you ‘too heavy’? Conversely, if you are below this figure, are you ‘too light’? Being over and underweight can bring a whole raft of health consequences.
Hopefully you would agree with me in saying that the ‘average’ human weight is not a good benchmark to use if you want to get healthier. Or at least it is not the only benchmark you should think about.
But unfortunately … many manufacturers use approaches that are embarrassingly close to this ridiculous approach to continual improvement.
I am constantly confronted by students, reliability engineers and other people banging fists on tables and saying …
… 89 percent of failures are random …
Firstly, 100 percent of failures are random. It’s just that there are lots of textbooks and experts telling us that a ‘random’ failure is one that happens irrespective of age. That is, a failure with a constant ‘failure rate’ where the item in question doesn’t appear to age or wear out.
Many of us like to think that we can, at least sometimes, be objective. Which is the opposite of being subjective.
What does this mean? Something is ‘objective’ if it only depends on the world around it, and nothing else. Like the ‘perfect juror’ who is only swayed by facts and evidence when determining if he or she thinks someone is guilty of murder. Something is ‘subjective’ if it can be influenced … by itself. Like the ‘imperfect juror’ who decides to acquit a murder suspect regardless of the evidence … because the suspect is his or her brother. This is called bias.
Boeing has somehow managed to make the bad public relations created by those pesky onboard batteries catching fire in 2013 practically disappear. Not through good management. But through a never-ending series of disasters and catastrophes that shows no sign of letting up which is dominating Boeing’s news cycle that there is no remaining airtime for missteps like those battery fires.
Apple recently did something that it isn’t in the habit of doing. And that is – admitting failure. After spending $ 10 billion on ‘Project Titan’ whose aim was to produce a ‘really cool car,’ Apple decided to pull the pin and cancel it.
Simplifying Apple’s Project Titan ambitions to something as pithy as creating a ‘really cool car’ might seem a little condescending. The problem for Apple was that unfortunately, this was the practical truth. And that is why it failed.
We like to think we make decisions based on information. We don’t. We make decisions based on emotions. And the most important emotion we rely upon for decision-making is confidence. We can be provided all the information in the world, but if we can’t understand it, trust it or believe it, we look for confidence in other ways. Often to disastrous outcomes.
The number of ‘well-funded’ production efforts full of ‘very smart people’ that routinely generate expensive but unreliable products is sadly, very high. And it all comes down to the wrong types of confidence that well-paid decision-makers chase.
What does it mean to be a ‘visionary leader’? It starts with being different to most people. You can’t just become a visionary leader by completing a leadership course, being mentored by someone awesome, or by compiling an impressive curriculum vitae (although these can help people with the potential to become visionary leaders get there).
One of the first things that the then United States Army Chief of Staff (General George C. Marshall) did at the outbreak of World War II was to fire the majority of his officers who had climbed the ladder of military ranks throughout the previous 20 years of relative peace.
Boeing is really having a bad stretch. Or more specifically, the passengers flying in its 737 MAX aircraft are.
Most recently a ‘plug’ flew off the side of Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane in flight, leaving a refrigerator sized hole next to startled (but mercifully still living) passengers. A ‘plug’ is a panel that seals up a hole in the fuselage that is included during manufacture to allow an optional emergency exit to be installed.
This failure is not a good look … especially for a three-month-old plane. Lots of manufacturers of different machines throughout history have been able to successfully bolt panels to cover holes of a similar size to that of an aircraft emergency exit. It is not hard to do. Nor is it hard to have systems in place to make sure it is done right.
Apple new iPhones will be somewhat different to those of the past. They will now have a USB-C charging and data port, and not Apple’s lightning cables. Why? Because the European Union said so. And they said so because they are not happy with the number of different charging cables we all now need for our various devices. Having a single cable that can charge an iPhone, Samsung smartphone, and virtually every other small electronic consumer product makes sense. It means fewer cables, smaller carbon footprints, less electronic waste, and prices will come down as less and less products assume that they need to provide a charging cable in their packaging. I have at least 20 power cables in my office that have been provided with various electronic gadgetry over the years.