Transcription
Everyone's wrong, no matter who you are. Everyone's wrong some of the time. The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist. Why would people do that? Well, everyone's been trained in high school and college that you've got to answer the questions; convergent logic. So you can tell the professor your question is done, that you'll get a bad grade if you don't answer the question. So everyone's basically, without knowing it, they've got like a mental straightjacket on. They'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. Just make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. No matter who you are, everyone's wrong some of the time. Then, uh, try very hard to delete the part or process. This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not leading enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards, "Let's add this part or priceless step in case we need it," but you can basically make "in case" arguments for so many things. Only the third step is simplify or optimize. The third step got the first step. Finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time. If you're moving too slowly, go faster, but don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. And then the final step is automate. Personally, I made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted.