Category: Project Success

Start with the Plan

9/1/2021

Good engineering starts with a good plan with specific goals. The best engineers I have known are not the ones that are the smartest or most clever, but the ones who can distinguish between an engineering challenge for challenge sake and an actual problem that needs to be solved.

I saw an Elon Musk video recently on the 5-step manufacturing process that had a quote I really appreciated: "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist"

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Use Test to Improve Design

8/30/2021

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Testing your device is important at all levels. Validation testing can help developers improve the design. Accelerated life testing can help improve the durability. Functional testing can help manufacturing improve yield. There are many ways testing can improve your product.

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Loyalty

8/30/2021

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There have been many times I have seen employees come and go at a client while we worked on their project. It is easy to think that building your “own team” means having more stability and loyalty. Project-based workers are sometimes viewed as if we are just passing through and not really invested in the project. A good service provider should bring as much or more loyalty as your direct employees.

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Expertise and Ego

8/30/2021

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When looking for help with your project, you need that unique combination of someone who brings expertise but also leaves their ego at the door and knows how to play nice with the rest of your team. That may seem like a unicorn, but some of us are pretty good at it, if I do say so myself, leaving my ego at the door.

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Do the Difficult Thing First

8/30/2021

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When starting a new project, there’s always a long list of tasks. Resist the temptation to do the easy tasks first. Instead, start with the most difficult part. This is the risk area. If it doesn’t work, the low-hanging fruit is pointless. Solving the hard part may change the direction for the project which could mean redoing easy tasks anyway.

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"Shoot the Engineer"

8/30/2021

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Engineering is never “done”. Engineers gonna engineer. You have probably never heard an engineer say “That’s perfect. There’s nothing more I would change. Ship it.” More likely, you hear “You know what this toilet seat needs is BlueTooth and a phone app.”

Having well-defined criteria for completion is important to knowing when your product is ready. And that is functional criteria, not a list of engineering tasks. Minus that, the engineers will continue engineering endlessly.

My first boss out of college always said “There comes a point in every project where you have to shoot the engineer.” A bit harsh, perhaps. And just to be clear, he never actually did that to my knowledge. The point was well taken and I have made an effort during my career to focus on the business case for the project, not just the engineering perspective.

Rather than shooting them, I have a better suggestion: distract them with the next shiny engineering challenge. Buy them a dev kit from SparkFun so they can play around with something new. Or ask them if they know anything about ______ (literally any piece of technology). That should keep them busy long enough for you to ship your product.

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Plan for Test Early

8/11/2021

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Engage your test engineering team as part of your design process. Don’t wait to finish the design before planning for test.

During you development cycle, you should also develop a testing strategy and a test specification. The earlier in your design process the better. Often there are design choices that can make testing easier with little effort.

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Choosing a LabVIEW Framework

7/24/2020

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A framework is a set of code, strategies, and programming techniques that serve as a starting point for a program. Like the framework of a building, it provides the basic structure. You can then build the details of your application around that basic structure.

A framework provides some boiler plate code, saving time by giving you a jump start at development.

It also standardizes the programming style, making it easier to read code from other developers. It is especially helpful in a team environment to have everyone on the team coding with similar styles and techniques.

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Specify: You Hit What You Aim For

6/22/2020

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We think of engineering projects in 5 distinct phases:

Specify
Design
Implement
Validate
Deliver

The first step, Specify, is in many ways the most important step. This is the step that sets the direction for everything that will come after it.

Too often, the engineer in all of us wants to get right to the meat of the project. Even before we have analyzed the full scope, we want to get to the fun part. I submit that the rest can be fun too. The whole solution is part of the challenge. Some problems are solved with a circuit, some with code, but others can only be solved by other factors.

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