I heard an interview with golf coach Karl Morris on sports radio recently. Karl works more on the psychology of playing golf than the mechanics of the swing (themindfactor.net). One piece of advice he gives is that golfers should always keep their eyes over the pin when walking to take their next shot. This is […]
Author: ulick
Reversible and Irreversible Changes
John F Kennedy said “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction”. One of the most useful and important things to determine early in your project planning process about a proposed change is whether the change is easily reversible. This knowledge can help determine […]
Post-Mortems, Pre-Mortems and Mid-Mortems
George Santayana stated that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Nowhere is this more evident than in the execution of projects in any industry if the lessons of previous projects are not remembered. It is important to have a good systematic process to review projects when they are completed, no […]
Beware of Unknown Unknowns
In 2002 US Secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld drew attention to the danger of unknown unknowns when answering a journalist’s questions about the lack of evidence linking Iraq to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. He said “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are […]
Allocate time to develop longer term solutions
Manufacturing support engineers spend much time trying to reduce defects and other operational problems. We are always looking for a quick fix, at what is different since the last time we made good product, at what adjustment within the validated range we can make that will suit the new lot of raw material. The process […]
A CAPA is a terrible thing to waste
Economist Paul Romer said in 2004 that ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste’. Now we are hearing many saying that we should strive to achieve long term benefits from the current COVID-19 crisis. Whatever about that, in regulatory industries we are only too familiar with CAPA’s, Corrective and preventative actions, which are crises […]
There is Always a Better Way
In recent years there has been considerable interest in improving the processes used to make medical devices and other similar materials. New manufacturing systems such as Total Quality, Six Sigma, Lean Thinking and others have been applied with varying degrees of success.This book focuses primarily on applying these approaches and others to improve the processes […]