This is not properly one of the Rules that determine human behavior. I learned this in art school and use it as a primary engineering guide line. With it I have been able to make change after change in places where the culture claims that “You can’t change anything!” Basically it takes advantage of two types of leadership: the “careerist” who lives in fear of failure and whose leadership style is based in obligations and intimidation, and the “altruist” who deals in ideas and ideals.
The important part of this guideline is to do your homework. While experience may tell you that doing something in a particular way will work better than a traditional way, you must have the facts to support your change—hard, measurable facts.
Example 1: I was sent to a manufacturing department that had a team developing software and hardware for testing the various types of boards that they produced: CPUs, IO boards, and Power Supplies. The system was developed in a UNIX clone for PC. To print code out to work with, one had to:
• Capture the code
• Throw it to the DOS partition
• Reboot the PC-AT
• Log onto the network
• Print the document
• Reboot back to UNIX
• Go down to the network room and wait for them to pull one’s job from the line printer
The 6 members of the previous team, after two years are trying to get cheap local printers, quit in mass and went to another company. I was sent in to take over, with the one remaining member of the team, a contractor and a programmer to-be-named-later. After a week of dealing with the problem I went to my boss and talked about working with the printer. I never made it an ego thing or challenged his authority; I just was sharing some information with him. Such as:
• It takes 15 minutes for the complete process
• We do it an average of 6 times a day
• So we spend an hour and a half getting screen captures
Then I asked, “How much we charged for engineering time?”
“$150 an hour,” my boss replied, then he looked alarmed for a second and exclaimed, “A printer from stores only costs $89!”
I returned with 4 printers. Facts and not emotions won the day. My boss even got to take the credit for the improved performance—but we had the printers. By the way, we finished the project in 8 months and the software ran for 7 years with no bugs.
Example 2: My first civilian job after leaving the Army was with a company that made grinding machines. They did it the same way they had been doing it for 40+ years—many still had relays as the primary control component. The control panels were made up of buttons arranged, over the years, by filling in any gaps with any new buttons that needed to be added. Change was frowned upon.
I first turned to the National Electric Code (NEC) and the Joint Industrial Code (JIC), the standards for human interface designs used on machine tools.
Then I documented that our “standard” control panel was not standard, but changed for every machine.
Then I reorganized the control panel to put all indicators across the top, in the order of operation, and the control buttons, on the left from top to bottom going into the cycle, on the right, bottom to top leaving the cycle, so that start and top controls were next to each other.
It did have more open space on the panel, which did cost a few more dollars a machine. When challenged by sales and marketing about the cost increase (a few dollars on half million dollar machines), I pointed to the documentation showing that we were in violation of the NEC and the JIC and demonstrated that the new system handled all possible machines because there was space for each feature. The standardization would save more than the extra material for the larger panel and marketing could now claim compliance with more standards.
The machine, during run off so impressed the customers that they ordered $7,000,000+ worth of machines the day the demonstration succeeded. They could tell the state of the machine from across the plant floor.
Many managers are afraid of facts because they can be held accountable if they ignore them. The leader may disagree, but he will disagree based on his facts and what will most likely happen will be a good engineering discussion that will usually lead to a better design.