True Progress

Introduction

Analyzing and controlling risk is one of the most important aspects of the engineering design process. These risks include health and safety, design robustness and reliability, maintainability, marketability, cost, schedule, and performance.

Yet, many of these risks are managed only by the intuition of the project manager or management team. While many are skilled enough to investigate and control most of these risks, the number of projects that fail to meet functional requirements, cost limits, scheduled deadlines, reliability expectations, or other thing, serves as testament to the fact that the complexity of risk management on modern projects is beyond the capabilities of our current system of doing things. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the difference, and does it matter?

Whether implementing a new technology or attempting to solve a problem we currently face in the world or even just making mundate decisions about our daily activities, we continually make judgements about the risks we face. With our liminted resources, time, and skill we choose to limit some of our exposure to risk and accept others. But, when making those decisions, we open ourselves to psychological biases about risk and often make a decision that puts us in a poorer position than we otherwise would have been. Read the rest of this entry »

Often as a reliability engineer, or anyone responsible for researching the reliability of an item, or calculating it, you will find oversimplified published data giving you the impression that reliability is an unchanging physical property like mass or volume, something intrinsic to the materials included in it. This is actually the common sense approach; we know an old thing is less reliable than a new copy of the same thing. But, this common sense gets argued out of us when we are faced with reconciling tables of MTBF (mean time between failures) values, nines (i.e. 0.99999, a measure of reliability), failure rates and other things. Let’s get back to the common sense approach, but with math. Read the rest of this entry »

Evaluating Likelihood and Addressing Uncertainty when Applying Solutions

This is the third article in a five part series.

In the first two articles in this series we looked at identifying a problem and a functional understanding of that problem and then at determining all the causes of that problem. Now, we are going to consider how to take account of uncertain data regarding future events both in the probability that they may occur and in the degree to which they might occur. People are generally bad at statistics, which makes this part of the risk assessment process counterintuitive at times. However, risk is something we do accept on a daily basis, and so I will try and find some analogies. Again, this series is about taking politics and argumentative posturing out of the decision making process regarding climate change. To be sure we adhere to that premise, I will continue to make my examples totally neutral regarding the data and whether we are talking about a warming or cooling climate; I am discussing the decision making process. Read the rest of this entry »