The Fear of Reliability

MTBF is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is possibly a lack of interest in reliability. Which I doubt is the case. Or it is a bit of fear of reliability.

Many shy away from the statistics involved. Some simply do not want to know the currently unknown. It could be the fear of potential bad news that the design isn’t reliable enough. Some do not care to know about problems that will require solving.

Whatever the source of the uneasiness, you may know one or more coworkers who would rather not deal with reliability in any direct manner.

Is ‘Reliaphobia’ a Thing?

Maybe not directly, yet the symptoms seem to be there. A set of avoidance concerning the topic. There is a lack of focus on understanding or improving reliability. The dismissal of estimates or test results. The rush to ‘put right’ any life-limiting problems.

The general desire to move on or away from detailed discussions concerning reliability is a clue. This may be difficult for reliability professionals to grasp as we tend to enjoy understanding failure mechanisms. We tend to work to estimate or analyze reliability performance. It is what we do.

Other than the math, does mechanical engineering engender such avoidance? For power electronics, a bit of fear is good, as touching a live circuit could be fatal. Discussion a plan to improve reliability performance may require a bit of thinking, yet certainly isn’t dangerous.

Maybe there is a fear of reliability at work around us.

A Personal Fear

Maybe those we work with avoid little more than saying reliability is important and avoid understanding reliability because it may lead to more work or reflect poorly on their design.

If you have been part of an FMEA discussion, you may have noticed the uneasiness of the person responsible for the design. The group of people around the table, one by one, describe potential weaknesses or flaws with the design. We’re basically saying the design may be inadequate, which in a way is saying the designer is likewise inadequate.

Few enjoy such sediment from their peers.

Others may see the highlighting or understanding of a design’s reliability performance as just another way to add work to an already busy timeline. I once worked with a project manager who didn’t want to perform any testing to fail. One, failure is bad, and we don’t want to have failures. Two, any weaknesses or flaws that would limit the product’s life would require additional time to understand and solve. Time, that just was not available.

The less he knew, the better the development plan (fictitious that it was) appeared.

An Organizational Fear

We set up systems and processes within organizations to facilitate decision-making. We attempt to provide just the right information at the right time to permit moving forward with a project.

At times, we learn about field failures that may or may not lead to significant warranty expenses. The ability to recognize, understand, and report the problem all too often relies on individual heroism. The organizational system tends to provide a local focus and avoid spotting and dealing with reliability issues.

All too often, the customer service team, dealing with product failures daily, does not delve into root cause analysis or time-to-failure tracking. They focus on helping the customer get working again or ship them a new product.

The operations team often focuses on yield improvement without paying attention to the latent defects they are shipping with each product.

Likewise, the development team focuses on delivering new designs on time and within budget with little more than a cursory review of the few field issues they have heard about at some point.

An organization rarely establishes the appropriate systems to encourage the identification,  understanding, and systemic resolution of failures. Failures are bad and we don’t like to talk about bad things.

Summary

I do not think ‘reliaphobia’ is a condition that our medical community will offer remedy. It is up to us to identify and cure the condition.

Oh, on MTBF. I suspect it is that easy to use, no need to understand, metric that does a fine job hiding the problems and limiting understanding that supports the fear of reliability condition. If your organization uses MTBF, it may be a coping mechanism that they are thus ‘doing’ reliability.

Setting up systems, reporting, education, and encouragement all seem to reduce the fear of reliability. A steady dose of solving problems and getting great results is another sure path to curing the condition.

Is the fear of reliability rampant in your organization? What steps are you taking to cure the local condition?