It’s one of my usual days at office.
Clock was ticking; I was busy working on one of my components. Soon I didn’t
realize it was lunch time.
I went out for lunch with my team mates.
Though the Cafeteria is filled with all the yummy food ready to be served, I
resist the temptation and carry freshly made home food.It’s been a habit for a
while now.
We are a group of electrical engineers.
One of my lunch mates John Bate has been with the organization for 17 years now
and he still brings in so much energy to work every day.
I am always overwhelmed at his interest
and energy levels during technical discussions. I was curious to know the
secret behind this and picked up conversation with him.
Me: what made you stay so long with the
organization ?
John:
I am always thinking about improving our
work environment, how to make it work better, faster, less waste, and about how
I can contribute to the product with my knowledge.
My group once noticed that they were
making a lot of design mistakes. Every mistake cost lots of time and money in
terms of project development. I thought about what we were seeing then figured
out how to automate some of the testing to at least catch a few of the easy
issues. It is similar to someone finally inventing a spell checker. Spell
checkers are so great and tell you about the spelling problem very quickly,
mostly as soon as you make it. Of course, it could not tell you that you chose
the write word, and that your smelling was correct. It wasn’t a good grammar
checker, just a stupid computer. Thinking was still important.
Another time I noticed an engineer
working hard to get all the schematics ready for a documentation release. I
asked what he did, he explained that he had to put a Title on each page, number
the pages, put a Table of Contents on the pages, build cross reference pages of
all the components (alphabetical of course), etc. How long does this take I
asked? Oh, about 2 weeks – I might have to start over if there were any last
minute changes.
I gasped. Let me try to automate this
for you. So I worked on and off for about 6 months, learning about the
scripting tools, testing, and experimenting. When it was all done I had
scripted the work to give not only what they had started with but included
sorting the components, multiple levels of table of contents, etc. The
scripting ran, and it ran fast.
Scripting reduced the manual work down
to 10 minutes (from 2 weeks). So, basically, the scripts saved the project 2
man weeks (80 hrs.). The nice thing here also is that late minute changes were
not going to kill the project. We just reran the script, over and over again
until everything was right. The engineer could now spend that time on more important
things, like going home at a reasonable time to be with his/her family. This
work is still in use in my company’s USA, Sweden, Bangalore and China offices.
My current team operates mostly in a
fire fighting mode. It has requests and new designs and testing issues all the
time. It is hard to keep up with it all. I recently helped start an new way of
working (Agile Kanban) to at least begin to reduce the crazy chaos – the
changes are ongoing and only time will tell if this will help. I think it will
as we can get a better idea of the work load on the team, maybe we’ll have data
to support hiring an additional engineer.
The key on much of my work is that I
think. Is there a better way to do this? Is this step really really necessary?
What can we do here to improve the quality, the delivery, reduce the cost, and
reduce the waste? One should never stop thinking – even after you get out of
school you should never stop thinking. Are the engineers really using their
talent to “engineer” something or are they using their talent to make fix
spelling mistakes.
Difficult people do exist. You can never
change a person if that person does not want to change. Never. In those
somewhat rare cases I cannot do much except move on. Fortunately it is not
often.
I have my share of good and bad days at
work – the good days are fun, but with the bad I try to think positive.
Positive attitudes always help.
Wow it was a great food for thought.
Thank you John!!!
Yes, As John said when we bring in
creative energies at work; bad days aren’t bad anymore but rather challenging.
