At 03:50 PM Monday 7/25/2005, Dan Minette wrote:
A couple of similar observations (if for no other purpose than to show that
Dan's experience is not the single available data point . . . )
[snip]
I will start the analysis by using a very old technique: looking at how
this question has been solved in an easier context and then seeing if the
lessons learned there can be applied to this problem. The context that I
will consider is one that has strongly influenced my thinking, both
professional and personal, over the last 15-20 years. It is the solving of
reported field problems at my first job, with Dresser Atlas.
When I joined Dresser Atlas, I noticed a vicious circle between operations
and engineering. To give a bit of background, our group was responsible
for the design and support of nuclear tools that were run by operations in
customers' oil wells. Operations were directly responsible for the
accuracy and reliability of the tools. Since the tools were designed and
characterized by engineering, fundamental problems were referred to
engineering.
This usually happened in the "fire drill" mode. A customer would express
significant dissatisfaction with our service, indicating a possible cut off
of Atlas from working for them. The field would report the problem that
they saw as responsible for the problem and make an urgent request to
engineering to solve the problem. Engineering would stop it's long term
work for anywhere from a day to two weeks, investigate the reported
problem, and respond.
Most of the time, it was an exercise in futility and frustration.
Engineering could not find the reported problem. Indeed, many times, the
work gave strong indications that the reported problem was very unlikely to
exist. Engineering would report this back to the field, frustrated at
losing time in the development of new tools, which were also demanded by
the field. The field became frustrated and angry at what they considered
the culture of denial in engineering.
In most operational units in the Air Force (i.e., units which actually had
planes and flew them rather than providing a support function only), there
are usually two divisions in the unit: "operations," which flies the
planes, and "maintenance," which keeps the planes in flying condition. As
in Dan's example, when something goes wrong, the pilot from ops blames
maintenance for not maintaining the aircraft or at least the malfunctioning
part properly, and maintenance turns right around and blames the pilot for
breaking it. The unit I was in, which was a part of the Flight Test
Center, had a third branch called "engineering," which in that unit was
responsible for planning the test missions in order to test whatever
capability of the aircraft or other system needed testing and then to
collect whatever data was sent back via telemetry or recorded by on-board
instruments or instruments on the ground (e.g., a radar site or other
instrument which recorded the flight path of the aircraft being
tested). Thus, instead of ops blaming maintenance and maintenance blaming
ops for whatever went wrong, both blamed engineering . . . (Yes, I was in
engineering).
[snip]
3) It is impossible to be totally open to every possibility; while getting
locked in a particular mindset will blind you to obvious solutions.
This seems like a contradiction, but it really isn't. It is a balance
point. One cannot be totally open minded to every possibility, because the
possibilities are virtually endless. One joke I use to make about this
when we were stumped concerning the source of a problem was "Well, I don't
think we need to look at the effect of the barometric pressure in Cleveland
on our data." In other words, we needed to be open minded, but not too
open minded.
At the university where I did my undergraduate work, the freshman physics
course for majors was taught by the department head. During one of the
first labs, where the purpose was to collect some data from an experiment
and fit it to an equation to show that verily the equation derived from
theory did describe the results, Dr. Morton would start things off by
suggesting an alternative equation which had as additional variables things
like the phase of the Moon or the day of the week . . .
[snip]
--Ronn! :)
I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon.
I never dreamed that I would see the last.
--Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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