• Question: Think of a specific engineering project when you answer this question. What could you have done to be more successful in achieving your goal(s)?

    Asked by Sarah N x to Ray, Laura, John G, Catherine, Ashley on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Everything. Nothing is perfect. There’s always something I could have done better, smarter, faster and cheaper. One specific problem was that we decided it would be better to save money (as we have a very small budget) to build a certain machine we needed. We spent about 3 years trying to do it and in the end, we had to buy it because we weren’t able to make it. We wasted a lot of time, however I learned a lot about how the machine worked and this helped me enormously when it came to programming it. I felt the time was wasted but not the learning experience.

    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      In one of my last projects we set out to do too many things with too many companies all based in different locations. Because of this we couldn’t achieve everything we wanted to in the time. I learnt from and made sure the next projects were more realistic and more focused on what was important. Having said that in engineering you are always learning from mistakes and finding ways to do things better the next time.

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I suppose the only way a project can truly fail is if you don’t learn something from it. One of my recent projects took months longer than anticipated but the results were more precise than I’d expected. Sometimes a close approximation is probably a better option than trying to get something to be perfect. Overworking a project was probably not the best idea in the world as the customers were NOT happy.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      For most projects this is true…. Communication. Making sure all the team has all the same up to date information. The faster project moves or the bigger the team the more this is relevant

    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      There is always room for improvement to make projects more successful. When we start a new project we open a lessons learned register. This is where we record the lessons that helped the project to be successful. The lessons learned is a good way of documenting what happened and why. This is shared around the team when projects are closed so that everyone understands these lessons so that the next project can be even better.

Comments