If you want to more than double productivity from your engineering team, you must avoid these sins at all costs”
By Robert Mote PhD PEng, Motagg Solutions Inc.
Continue Leave a Comment November 1, 2009
The professional review is in for The Engineer's Tables. This review is used by libraries and publishers to find opinions from critcal editors and determine their selection criterion of ideas, clarity and purpose.
I agree with their main thrust. Next year, I plan to expand into audiovisual examples using Adobe Captivate, or Camtasia. This will ensure the message gets over faster.
Leave a Comment October 31, 2009
We know of writer’s block but have you heard of engineer’s block? You might encounter it as ‘not rocking the boat’ or changing the way things get done because you cannot do it. Sometimes it is difficult to find enthusiasm for the work when it is the same grind, you’re still broke and apathy creeps in. In your mind you want something else and you wave the magic sword of Zorro against impossible odds.
Continue Leave a Comment October 27, 2009
Engineers’ career go through a lifecycle of changes in roles but I believe we have a responsibility to future generations of engineers and we start this through our calculations. Try this pop quiz…
Continue 2 Comments August 20, 2009
My first article reaches a bigger audience this week. It is titled A Structured Mess, you can find it at http://tiny.cc/2kmyS
I posted it to a group of process engineers to see if it resonated with them and I have to say I really like this group of inquisitive and bright engineers. They actively use the internet to find and share information. I will be spending more time with them! Very illuminating comments.
Did you know? As Michael Caine would say:
Your comments are absolutely correct. I also have seen the “dumbing down” of our calculations, but I think one of the most interesting is how you can use EXCEL to demonstrate that 1/0 = 1319.07
In cell B2, enter the value 1
In cell B3, enter the equation =1/B2
Then, using goal seek, set the value of cell B3 to zero by adjusting the value in cell B2. Always converges to 1319.07
Keith mentions the effect of changing the starting point of a calculation to change convergence. In EXCEL, if you begin with “2″ in cell B2 instead of “1″, it changes the convergence … it changes to 1/0 = 1007.68
Very repeatable
What is frightening is the fact that millions of calculations have been done using goal seek in EXCEL, and people do not understand how it actually works.
This came from John Westover and I didn’t know this. I had, for the longest time, limited myself to only 10% of Excel and avoided learning such possibilities but goodness me, what they don’t tell you!
Leave a Comment July 11, 2009
Ay long last my excel database project has been rolled out and demonstrated. It works very well and now starting on the top level reports.
As a result of all of that effort, I am staying on Firebag for the foreseeable future.
Seminars have been posted for end July. In-house corporate work is going to be the focus for the next few months. Articles will start being released in August and continue monthly until December.
Now as the dust settles, I will finish the third book.
Leave a Comment July 1, 2009
Leave a Comment June 25, 2009
I know I can show you an easier way to do calculations and enjoy it. But I know that no one like changes, most of all engineers! We get stuck in our ways and it works for us. Change takes effort and careful reconsideration. So why change? Particularly if no one else is willing to change.
Firstly, you have to want to change. I can think of a whole host of reasons to change and I will lay them out. But first we have to agree we have a problem. It takes many forms: maybe you don’t like doing our calculations anymore. Maybe you are not happy checking 500 pages. Or maybe you are concerned with the time it is taking your team to complete the task.
The attention span of an engineer to new ideas is superfast, loaded with cynicism, skepticism and instant dismissal. It can take a word to lose them. Just say “spreadsheet” and bang they’re off. And I wrestle with the difference between revolution and evolution. Some see my ideas as a revolution and I think OK but to me it is more of an evolution.
I have lived with it and developed it over a long period of time; it has been a process of continuous adaptations and constant feedback to the engineer in the design office doing the calculations. It is now a tested and proven idea ready to be shared with engineers who are willing to evolve to a new way of doing calculations. However, the results of applying the ideas go far beyond the personal and immediate goals, it is so much more as a team.
Revolution implies resistance and a fight to change, possibly big changes. Fortunately, many engineers will be familiar with many of the suggestions, which are hardly revolutionary; it is their practical, collective and connective relationship that makes it works; so it is hardly revolutionary at that level.
Evolving to new ideas that will set standards in the future will be easier than changing your ways. To learn if you want to adapt , turn to your colleague and start to talk about the calculations, how you prepare it. Voice it and listen to yourself.
The evolution is a series of small steps and personal goals to adapt to the new ways. The revolution is the collective application by the team. Don’t judge the revolution, if evolution works for you. The revolution will speak for itself.
Leave a Comment June 5, 2009
When I was an undergraduate at Sheffield University I was told I had to take a two hours’ mandatory course in Industrial Pollution. That didn’t stop many of us from not turning up. It was just after lunchtime, when many of us had been in the pub, the sunshine was streaming in through tall dirty windows and we were ready to doze for two hours. we could only be twenty graduates there out of seventy. The lecturer turned up and was introduced to us and we were left alone. From that day to this, is the only two hours’ I remember with clarity. It was the most amazing experience of my life, that it was possible that someone could stand there and make us sit up and listen to him about Industrial Pollution. His name was Prof Andrew Porteus from The Open University. He boomed, he terrified us, he made us laugh and none of us who was on that course would forget him. I can still hear his voice echoing down the corridor of time, more than 28 years ago. He was a juggernaut. That is the experience I want to bring out in my seminars. He was an inspiration for me. I have always paid attention to industrial pollution and he very much triggered my conscience and first ethics issue in my first career in engineering.
While I had only non-existent respect for the subject of industrial pollution, in the space of two hours I would be transformed. What he did was teach me more than the subject. He believed and he traveled to make people listen and he was very very good at it. He was very non-academic in his approach.
Similarly, the seminars I present are a unique opportunity for the audience as it is from a professional engineer working in the trenches and realizing his experiences may be of value to anyone willing to listen. I want to give you the best of what I have and motivate you to find the spirit in you to do your best in the future. What I teach is ageless and timeless. Regardless of many years’ experience, or just starting. The future belongs to you. The opportunity some of you will get in your lifetime is going to be amazing and I look forward to the stories already BUT it starts today.
I am an engineering leader in calculations, compressor foundation designs, blast and designing work processes for the engineering team. I believe myself to be unique in what I do. I believe engineering leadership can be taught through any subject.
What I bring to the seminars, are my experiences, my judgment and a demonstration of my passion for what I do. What can you do with that? My mission here and now, is to get you to listen to me. Totally. Why do I do it? Not because it is a job, because it is my mission. Mission? Well you see I believe we are a profession in crisis and we need to talk to each other. If I can motivate some of you through my examples, books or seminars to carry the flame, then I am happy.
Engineering is not just cracking the problem and finding solutions, it is teamwork, busting out of the cubicle, talking, sharing, asking questions and still not getting answers. It is confidence, consideration and clarity. Engineering leadership is innovation through teamwork. If you shine, the team shines. I am trying to share everything I know and maybe you can run with it.
I am an engineer that has lived in three ages. An age without computers. I was taught by engineers with over thirty years’ experience with slide rules, log tables and common sense. I lived through the second age where the desktop computers killed the art of engineering. We are now in the third age, extinction or survival. We need the books, the experiences, and seminars to be run by engineers who live in the frontline of the real world and there are not many of us. Listen to my language and the unspoken words not just what I say. It is why I do what I do.
When I began doing compressor foundation designs, it was with Fortran programming. I spent years with the equations and programming them for solutions, but there is more to compressor foundation designs than the theory. There is the power of presentation. In a subject perceived to be complicated, the power of presentation is everything. I spent a lot of time emphasizing this. A default calculation will get you an eventual nod, a powerfully presented calculation will get a thank you! And your name will be remembered. Engineering is teamwork but Engineering is also about legacy. What you create is your reputation. Everything in my experience confirmed that, not that I knew it with foresight but only because I committed myself to quality, a long time ago. Accidental you might say, but I recognize it is Quality circles in action.
Whatever happens in the seminars won’t be the powerpoint slides or the notes you’ll never read that you remember. It will be that an engineer, Robert Mote came to town and gave me some really useful ideas and made me pay attention. When I do a seminar, that is my driving thought and the result I look for.
1 Comment June 1, 2009
I’ve said it before but, for the civil/structural engineer it really does start and end with the calculations.
In a design team, once the engineer accepts the commitment to produce quality-looking calculations it is an irreversible step. Like a pledge to oneself, wearing the iron ring, it is a commitment to quality. With the Mote Method, (s)he learns to ask critical questions aloud which were once nagging doubts. I had an email from a colleague saying that she was still using my ideas and her peers are just amazed at how quickly she is producing work, yet they tell each other, in the next sentence, that it must be too time-consuming! While she can do it, she is annoyed that she cannot recreate the demonstrations the way I do it.
During my early years, I have had to work for bosses like Martin O who believe because they can’t do it, you can’t do it but after years, he finally rolled over and thought it was obvious. Sigh…..I told her it is frustrating at times but persistence wins and she will find her voice. It took me years to recognise and synthesise the ideas, obvious as it looks now.
If you master the calculations, you master the communication. If you master the communication you master the manipulation. If you master the manipulation, you are on the path of engineering leadership. Engineering leadership isn’t about you, it is about the team. It does not matter if you lack confidence, suffer gender issues or feel disadvantaged. If you produce great calculations, the calculations will speak for you, your reputation and help the team.
While management leadership is the science. Engineering leadership is the art and it is the responsibility of every engineer; it is the perennial raising of the bar within oneself and the team in pursuit of excellence.
Everyone respect good calculations more than you know, therein lies the path to engineering leadership. For everyone.
Leave a Comment May 15, 2009