As an engineer, issues are any problem, obstacle or challenge between where you are and where you need to be. Issues may affect cost, schedule, quality, safety, and at times your mental health! One of the traits that separates good engineers from great engineers is how they deal with issues.

Many issues are preventable and although preventing an issue from arising is the best way to deal with issues, this post is assuming that you are not successful in preventing every issue; so now what?

Stories

The following two stories are based on real life experience….having made almost every mistake in the book, I have lots of stories!

UNAWARE

Once I was leading a project to upgrade the fire protection capability of a plant and everything was going well. We developed design changes, did detailed analysis, and made sure we met all the regulations. We were confident that all of the upgrades would be complete by the outage deadline. What we missed was an awareness and understanding of what actions the regulator needed to take to accept the upgrades before we could fully take credit for the upgrades. This lack of awareness was, in part, responsible for delaying the outage and was a painful lesson that awareness of all of the required steps to complete a project, especially interfaces and hand-offs is essential.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL

I’m sorry to say, I have many stories about issues related to lack of “attention to detail”. I am still looking for more effective ways to eliminate such problems in engineering work products. One story I like to share is during a very extensive audit by the regulator, with weeks of “kicking the tires”, the number of attention to detail findings was excessive in the calculations reviewed. Now, to a design engineering group, the integrity of their calculations is of paramount importance. Before the audit, the culture in group was to primarily focus on “results”; to get the right answer. Administrative details like page numbering, procedure requirements, and grammar were secondary considerations. During the audit, we learned that allowing administrative “attention to detail” errors to occur in our work products, cast a shadow of doubt as to the validity of the “results”. It was an ah-ha moment for the group. This experience occured many years ago, yet the lesson to get the little details right or confidence in the “results” will suffer needs to be reinforced in every new project I start.

I hope the following Do’s and Don’ts help you and your team more effectively manage issues that will inevitably occur.

Do

• Have a Questioning Attitude – don’t wait for issues to reveal themselves. Create a questioning attitude with your team so that you find the issues early.
• Face reality and attack it head on – the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that it exists. As humans we tend to procrastinate or wait and hope it gets better. It rarely gets better without a focused effort to overcome the problem.
• Ask for help – Raising issues and talking about what actions you are taking will often result in validation of your actions as well as additional ideas that are worth trying to solve the problem. Find the best person who can help you solve the problem.
• Track till closure – Some sort of tracking list is used, almost univerally, on engineering projects. Especially when multiple issues are being managed, a list is a great way to keep them visible and hold yourself accountable until the issue is resolved.

Don’t

• Blame others or make excuses – Get over it, and focus on the solution.
• Over analyse the cause – If the issue is significant, you will need to investigate the cause in order to find an effective fix and so the organization can learn. However, I find it is usually helpful to define the recovery plan quickly with only determining a most probable cause, initially. The 80-20 rule suggests that taking timely action to correct the problem based on the most likely cause will provide an effective and efficient solution.
• Give up – In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never…..Give up! The engineers who are successful, are relentless in their drive to solve problems, get answers, and find innovative ways to overcome any obstacle in their path.

Let me illustrate the difference between a good way to deal with issues and a not so good way.

Good Example:

ISSUE: A calculation error was discovered which affected a pending licensing action.

ACTION TAKEN:

• Notified management and regulator
• Assembled team to brainstorm solutions
• Brought in expertise to help
• Conservative decision making

RESULTS: While the cause of the error was rigorously evaluated in the long term, the first focus was to find the best solution, rather than look for the guilty. A design change was implemented on schedule that successfully resolved the issue. Lessons learned were shared with the organization, and now many years later I still use this story as a great example of issue management.

Not so Good Example:

ISSUE: While approaching a deliverable deadline, several issues were revealed that needed focus to resolve.

ACTION TAKEN (or not taken):

• Issues were not identified and tracked
• Unclear ownership for the issues
• Apparent reluctance to raise issues
• The “ask for help” came too late to meet deadline. However, it is important to note that only after raising the issue and asking for help did the issue get satisfactorily resolved.

RESULTS: Missed deadline, painful lesson learned to make issues visible and track to successful closure.

 

What do you think? How do you manage the inevitable issues that arise which can affect your deliverables?