Re: The joys of having a non technical manager.

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 12:09:34 -0700 (PDT), sfisher@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

My non technical manager thinks that our (very) complex electronic
products shouldn't have prototype stages in the project plan because
electronics engineers should aim to 'get it right first time'. This
guy has had 20 highly successful years of managing the production of
speakers, and treats every little design problem as a sign of
incompetance (and I do mean little).

Has anyone else had this kind of experience and how did you cope?

We cope by getting it right the first time.

My company philosophy is to go from paper to production. That means no
prototypes. The rev A drawings and parts lists and manuals are
formally released, manufacturing builds a few, and we make them work.
Over 90% of the time, we can sell rev A.

We do simulate or breadboard small circuits if we feel that we don't
fully understand the parts, but mostly we design from the datasheets.
But we never simulate or prototype whole products.

Prototyping is self-fulfilling. If you assume the first (or second, or
third) iteration won't be right, you won't make the effort to get it
right. The insidious factor is that debugging by testing prototypes
seldom finds all the bugs... *especially* when the designers are the
ones doing the testing.

We do keep a NEXT file on every rev of every product. Anybody in the
company can add comments or requests for things to be changed on
future revs. Manufacturing creates a lot of these, like about
mechanical clearances, or requests for test points, things like that.
Before we order future/large batches of boards, we review the NEXT
file to see if it's worth spinning the board.

John

I think there's a big difference, though, between assuming that you _must_ get a 100% success rate and aiming to get a really high success rate like 80 or 90 percent.

Further, if the guy really treats "every little design problem" as a big failure, then your testing and tweaking before you get your rev A boards into production would be signs of failure.

I've worked for companies run by sales guys who really did well at the motivational speaking, but just didn't have a clue about how engineering worked -- including the necessity to hash out problems. Consequently, if one of them got too close to a project the engineers were not _allowed_ to hash out problems before going into production, so the problems all came out in production.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
.

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