Separation of powers

As a "project engineer" I've come to appreciate why larger companies put R&D in a different building- so they can get something done. Anytime part of your duties include supporting manufacturing, you have a very hard time setting aside enough time to accomplish significant design goals. Instead the manufacturing support gets done and the development that can be done reasonably quickly gets done in spare time, research a new fitting-sure. Seriously, there is nothing I can do about part Z getting here 3 weeks late, yet I am dragged into those discussions all the time.

So if you're running a company or managing engineers, keep your functions separate, or else realize that someone working 25% on manufacturing support is in reality going to spend 75% of his time on it. Don't even drag them into it, you might help in the short run, but in the long run you're worse off if the entire company is running around putting out the fire of the moment.

A blog to read

I'm still thinking up a few medical device related posts, until I do, read Seth Godin's Blog in the meantime and apply it to your company. I spent the better part of my online time during the last two days doing just that, I'm apparently behind the curve because he has been popular for a while now.

He is big on maximizing presentations and has several rules for doing this with PowerPoint. He is a marketing guy- I'm not sure if these can be worked in so well with engineering presentations, however some of his general points still apply. If you're giving a presentation, you're selling something, make it count. We have several regular meetings that we spend the better part of an afternoon talking about first pass yield, output, etc. Unfortunately I've decided that in too many of my presentations during these I'm only selling the fact that "I'm doing a good job" and I should instead use the time to drive towards solutions I want.