Game in the Brain

We don’t treat other engineers well. We don’t value planning and knowledge.

I’m seeing a pattern. We wonder why people don’t pay for the service of Planning and Designing, and all our competitors play it close to the vest using network and asymmetry to play the market. We didnt treat engineers well and wasted their time – doing the exact same thing we hate from our own clients – Having no specific idea what we want and making them guess what it is.

This is the story, which I wont spend the time to tell, of the brand new Powder Coating Oven of the company. I have yet to have my Mentor, a mechanical engineer, investigate if we got value for our money in the thing – since we waste our time in the same way we waste the time of other engineers.

That Oven was a point of contention between my mom, my boss, and me. It felt wrong asking engineers to plan and design, with no intention of buying. Thats the thing – we needed to buy an Oven but we didn’t know how to get the specifications of the best value for our buck oven. It hit me harder recently when I realize this Oven was a great story of how we are screwed over by most of our clients – by how long we took to decide to buy an Oven we needed but could not understand what value of oven we wanted.

Basically the method should have been – to begin with a Systematic Capture of the Needs of the Company. To create the Specifications – There should have been a technical approach to capturing what we really needed in the first place. – What the FUCK did we want and what did it really cost in the first place. IF we did this – then we could have had the Oven Bidded Out properly – I admit I am the son of the owner who had no idea what I was doing thrown into this because there is great distrust in how this project is to be costed and implemented.

If I want to know if there is ever a way that Our Clients would ever pay for Specifications, Planning, Project Management, and Design – I realize it depends in their attitude about documentation, knowledge and studying. Because I can say that – after my studies – if there was a such a need – like our current need for a Wood Finishing oven – I’m going to approach this HELLA different from how I did before.

The first FUCKING thing I’d do different is DOCUMENT everything and proceduraly. By procedural – fucking begin with the Start of the Input – the Customized Department – fucking Industrial Engineer their space use, tolerances, and operations. To understand the sizes, spaces and activities they perform and defined the need.

Fucking Create the Template by which Bids and Offers will be created, and since we have our own inhouse Mechanical Engineering department – fucking – PLAN THE SHIT out of this.

By Plan I mean apply the PMBOK-Lite documentation (Which is the Work Instruction and Training I’ve been working on these past months). If things get messy – map and flowchart.

In my Present Biz Plan, my mentor noted that I proceeded with purely a Documentation approach. I’m so happy when 3 people realized, without me explaining, that the Simple but Systematic Strategy was because we fail to monitor, manage, and UNDERSTAND our own systems, failures, flaws, weaknesses, and strengths. That we work with uncertainty and “Because I told you” culture and that we cannot be Proactive, Predictive, Strategic if we ignore Feedback and our Basic Reasoning Capabilities.

Our clients will not Value Planning and Design, until we value planning and design. We cannot sell the value of such “Nose-bleed” concepts until we feel the results of understanding how they are supposed to work – and how we actually have the power to affect our surroundings.

Everyday I keep expecting that Automation would have made my job obsolete. That any day now – the habits and methods that are glaringly obvious that I’m implementing, that the best in the country have been using – and the best of the world is using to conquer will somehow make me jobless and leave me a bleak future. That I’m meat to be ground up. I have to quiet that panic everyday.

*Its Sad to know that we do have an Inhouse PMBOK expert and a PMI guy – but he had a Stroke and has severe motor and communication functions disabled. We keep him on, he’s awesome and hopefully my brother understands that his apprenticeship under him is VERY IMPORTANT for giving our chief PM another chance.