"I love to have a martini..."
I love to have a martini.
Two at the very most.
At three I'm under the table,
At four I'm under my host.
-Dorothy Parker
It's been that kind of week. We're on a fairly tight development schedule for our next product (name and details withheld, mucho secrecy, I'd have to kill you, etc) and trying to get all the engineers on the same page is like trying to herd cats.
I don't often write about what I do for a living except tangentially. This is to avoid confusing people. Engineering change control is the process of creating products, then making changes to products in a logical and measured matter. Everything that's manufactured industrially is under some form of change control.
Example: Pick up a pen from your desk and look at it. It's a simple object, but it has discrete parts: the cap, the barrel, the nib, the ink reservoir, the ink itself. Each of those items has a specification. There's an overall specification for how they all fit together and interact, too. Making a change to that pen- say, change the color of the plastic barrel and cap from red to blue- requires a lot of coordination between different parts of the company, from Marketing choosing the new color to Purchasing getting the new parts in to Production Control, who needs to get the new item on the floor in a controlled manner. Other groups are involved, too- Receiving Inspection needs to know how to handle the change; Cost Accounting needs to know how these new parts affect our costs of manufacturing the item; Sales/Shipping need to be able to differentiate between the old and the new versions of products, to name a few.
The way that gets done is a document called an Change Order. I process and route and mediate and implement these things. It's like being a product's midwife and doctor and mortician rolled into one, really. The kid ain't yours, but you help it get from womb to cradle; as it ages, you help it adapt to its new challenges; when it's lived its useful life, you help tuck it into the coffin and arrange flowers around it.... while a pair of forceps are sticking out of your back pocket, ready to help deliver its successor.
This role is complicated by the fact that I work for a medical device manufacturer, which means I'm under heavy regulatory scrutiny. Functionally, that means we have a lot more specification-type work up front, and a lot of lawyerly scrutiny on everything. If we make too many changes to an item, we can invalidate our FDA-granted license to sell the product- so change control is very serious stuff.
Today was especially trying. We're pushing a bug-fix firmware patch out to Production that has 143 units of urgent rework waiting before they can ship to customers- this is non-development work, technically, but I'm on it because the new fix is being integrated into my current dev line as well as full production. I spent the entire week coaxing the myriad DCOs through the system in the proper order to find out today around 2 PM than no one had bothered to write the one really important change order to integrate the firmware fix into the item BOM. I've never written a DCO so fast in my life. Write to release: three hours. Not quite a record, but damn close.
So it's very good to be at home, martini next to me, cat on my feet, with the knowledge I'm four clicks from Azeroth and some nice WoW-based escapism.
Two at the very most.
At three I'm under the table,
At four I'm under my host.
-Dorothy Parker
It's been that kind of week. We're on a fairly tight development schedule for our next product (name and details withheld, mucho secrecy, I'd have to kill you, etc) and trying to get all the engineers on the same page is like trying to herd cats.
I don't often write about what I do for a living except tangentially. This is to avoid confusing people. Engineering change control is the process of creating products, then making changes to products in a logical and measured matter. Everything that's manufactured industrially is under some form of change control.
Example: Pick up a pen from your desk and look at it. It's a simple object, but it has discrete parts: the cap, the barrel, the nib, the ink reservoir, the ink itself. Each of those items has a specification. There's an overall specification for how they all fit together and interact, too. Making a change to that pen- say, change the color of the plastic barrel and cap from red to blue- requires a lot of coordination between different parts of the company, from Marketing choosing the new color to Purchasing getting the new parts in to Production Control, who needs to get the new item on the floor in a controlled manner. Other groups are involved, too- Receiving Inspection needs to know how to handle the change; Cost Accounting needs to know how these new parts affect our costs of manufacturing the item; Sales/Shipping need to be able to differentiate between the old and the new versions of products, to name a few.
The way that gets done is a document called an Change Order. I process and route and mediate and implement these things. It's like being a product's midwife and doctor and mortician rolled into one, really. The kid ain't yours, but you help it get from womb to cradle; as it ages, you help it adapt to its new challenges; when it's lived its useful life, you help tuck it into the coffin and arrange flowers around it.... while a pair of forceps are sticking out of your back pocket, ready to help deliver its successor.
This role is complicated by the fact that I work for a medical device manufacturer, which means I'm under heavy regulatory scrutiny. Functionally, that means we have a lot more specification-type work up front, and a lot of lawyerly scrutiny on everything. If we make too many changes to an item, we can invalidate our FDA-granted license to sell the product- so change control is very serious stuff.
Today was especially trying. We're pushing a bug-fix firmware patch out to Production that has 143 units of urgent rework waiting before they can ship to customers- this is non-development work, technically, but I'm on it because the new fix is being integrated into my current dev line as well as full production. I spent the entire week coaxing the myriad DCOs through the system in the proper order to find out today around 2 PM than no one had bothered to write the one really important change order to integrate the firmware fix into the item BOM. I've never written a DCO so fast in my life. Write to release: three hours. Not quite a record, but damn close.
So it's very good to be at home, martini next to me, cat on my feet, with the knowledge I'm four clicks from Azeroth and some nice WoW-based escapism.