2017-12-15 Rules of thumb

some rules of thumb.
1) if there was no document, then there is no learning. When making a mistake – acknowledging it and documenting it is one of the best way of making sure the lessons sticks. If you weren’t documenting you weren’t really paying attention.
2) Assume 70-90% fail rate in the first try. Assume 3-4 tries where your getting feedback as to why each time failed
3) If you dont define the problem then you don’t understand the problem. If your thesis fails, then check to see if the understanding of the problem was effective. Again we go back to documentation – any “Method Tried” (We tried that) when there is no documentation is “We really dont know what we were doing, and we dont know if we understood the princples we experimented with”
4) Procedures/Problems with no data takes days to understand, hours to just ask clarifying questions, and weeks to write.
5) Ideally the Manager and the Director, 20-40% of their load is operations and 60-80% is problem solving. While supervisors are 60-80% operations and 20-40% monitoring/reporting. The manager and the director has the bandwidth to FIX problems – unless they created enough process stability that operations take less time and the work is planning and problem solving. In the end the One who has the luxury of being able to work without the distraction of daytoday operations fixes the hardest problems. If no one can make time to fix problems 8D-way then they will always be firefighting. (see 1, 2, 3, and 4).

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