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2022
- Thread starter RandyM
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Sad but true. Working for a Fortune 500 company, planning for and executing a new product/process, took over a year and typically overran the development time and budget.
In contrast, in the First program where high school students receive a new project involving designing and making a workable model to complete a specified task or tasks, they complete the task in a matter of weeks on a strictly limited budget while still continuing with their academic studies. If a group of teenagers without any formal engineering training can do this, why can't professional engineers?
Engineers can do it. Working for a (Fortune 500) company is what makes it take so long.
adding more people is what adds time.
A perfect group is 3 highly motivated people. After that, you get the people who just waste time.
Keep the managers far from the project, only include them if you need to knock down some doors/obstacles. They always seem to slow down projects if they get the claws into it.
I was an engineering manager for 16 years prior to retirement.
One of the last projects that I worked on involved a third party making molds for injection molding parts and subsequent production of the parts.. When the project was approved for a go-ahead, upper management gave us a budget and a timeline for completion. We were to submit bids from three different companies. Our department had done considerable leg work ahead of time and had picked the vendor most likely to succeed. They weren't the low bidder so upper management decided to go with an alternate. The legal staff hemmed and hawed and weren't able to get together a final contract until after the deadline for completion of the project. I retired six months after that and a year after I retired, they still hadn't delivered the first prototype parts.
To be fair, the part was a challenge for any molder due to the geometry involved and the tight specification requirements. But some five years prior, I had the part made through a protoping company in GA using their offshore manufacturing facility so I knew it wasn't impossible.
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