Ah sweet release!
Its amazing how when you finish a project, you have this almost euphoric feeling, a huge weight comes off your shoulders, and your outlook on life changes in almost an instant. This feeling comes even after a project which you enjoy, but is magnified ten fold when you have a project that has been literally sucking the life out of you.
The last few weeks I have been working on a project which I like very much, but is very demanding. I didn't realize how much time and energy it has taken until I finished the project this afternoon. The project i was working on was to develop an outdoor laser tag system for a guy who has no experience manufacturing a product. We took a very crude prototype and some drawings, and developed the system into a viable project. Little did I know when I got roped into this project ( I happened to be a wandering engineer who stuck his head into the coference room when I was messing around instead of working) that I would be stepping into a project with nearly impossible timelines, and a very fluid design. Somehow i managed to get a circuit designed, debugged and working and in a prototype gu that was to be demoed to customers in around 3 weeks. I thought then we would go to a much more realistic design cycle, but as luck would have it, the customers loved the prototype demo, and wanted production units as soon as possible. We worked many long hours, and many long nights and got a product that could go to production.
Our production schedule was insane. Thats the best way to describe it. The customer (who had no experience in manufacturing a product) had made some promises that were very difficult to keep, such as unrealistic delivery times (lead time of all parts: 6 weeks. Delivery date: 3 weeks!) and unfinalized metal work. I also realized at this point I was working for a maniac who had ADD, and I feel a touch of obsessive compulsive behavior. You know the type, the ultra successful person who tears through life, jumping from project to project, and somehow managing to use his charm and charisma to manage to make a living. Amazingly enough I actually found myself liking the guy despite his talent for sucking minutes out of your life, pushing you to do things outside the box, and managing to always make you run late.
I guess I should give you some background about what I do in life. I work for an electronics contract manufacturer as a production engineer. Basically I get to try to come up with ways to manufacture stuff, figure out ways to make designs that really smart people have come up with work on our manufacturing shop floor, and manage at least one crisis a day. My working life essentially boils down to bringing order out of chaos (also know as people who have never stepped out from behind their computer screen and actually checked how the part fits in real life!) and trying to help my production supervisors meet our sales guy's fantasy land delivery dates!
Now that you have an idea of what I do, imagine what happened to my life when suddenly a project with a custmer who is demanding, and who know little about how products get made is suddenly dropped into my lap. I spend 90% of my time not on designing the details that make the project successful, but instead trying to get the customer organized enough to tell me what it is he really wants. Around 5% of my time is spent waiting for him to arrive at the specified time of the meeting, and 3 to 4 % is spent repeating and defending what decisions I made to the customer. The final 1% of my time is spent actually engineering. Thankfully I have excellent coworkers who were able to help me get the details straight enough that we could actually make the project start to work the way it was supposed to. I truly think that my customer who is excellent at managing crisis, has to invent crisis to find solution to a problem. This to me seems a rather backwards way of doing business, but for him it works, and I had to adapt to his style if we were going to make this project work.
I didn't realize that i was bringing work home with me, until one night at dinner, the wife (loveley as always!) asked me what I was thinking about, because obviously I had not heard a word she had been saying for the last few minutes. She said that I had completely spaced off, and while she understands that guys sometimes do that when women are talking, this was an abnormally long time for me. I wasn't real sure of what i had been thinking about but just that my thoughts were someplace else. A few nights later, I slept quite poorly, and the realization hit me... I was dreaming about the sounds the laser tag guns make when they are working. I was waking up in the morning, feeling like I had been at work for a full 8 hours, as I had been having work dreams the whole night. You know the kind, the one where you do exactly what you do every day at work, just in your dream, and you never really get any of that big pile of disorganized junk off of your desk. I had dreams like this for around 3 weeks, when we were getting the whole project into production, and then I started to have dreams about getting the parts to our production people! Needless to say, this was very taxing on me, and my wife was getting fed up with it.
The odd thing about this whole situation, is that I fully enjoyed this project, troubles and all, and felt that it taught me a great deal about how to better manage a project, and to become a better engineer. It is amazing to me that something that can be so taxing can also be so rewarding and enjoyable. Either way, I am glad that this project is over for the time being and I can get back to being my normal old self at work. I also think that the wife will like this project being over, as I will no longer just space out for 5 mnutes streches, well at least thats what I will tell her.
Anyway, this was probably not as humorous as most of my posts, but sometimes you need to get a little perspective, you now a little fiber to go with all the pablum. I will now go off to completely enjoy my weekend, and taming the jungle that my lawn has become.
j
The last few weeks I have been working on a project which I like very much, but is very demanding. I didn't realize how much time and energy it has taken until I finished the project this afternoon. The project i was working on was to develop an outdoor laser tag system for a guy who has no experience manufacturing a product. We took a very crude prototype and some drawings, and developed the system into a viable project. Little did I know when I got roped into this project ( I happened to be a wandering engineer who stuck his head into the coference room when I was messing around instead of working) that I would be stepping into a project with nearly impossible timelines, and a very fluid design. Somehow i managed to get a circuit designed, debugged and working and in a prototype gu that was to be demoed to customers in around 3 weeks. I thought then we would go to a much more realistic design cycle, but as luck would have it, the customers loved the prototype demo, and wanted production units as soon as possible. We worked many long hours, and many long nights and got a product that could go to production.
Our production schedule was insane. Thats the best way to describe it. The customer (who had no experience in manufacturing a product) had made some promises that were very difficult to keep, such as unrealistic delivery times (lead time of all parts: 6 weeks. Delivery date: 3 weeks!) and unfinalized metal work. I also realized at this point I was working for a maniac who had ADD, and I feel a touch of obsessive compulsive behavior. You know the type, the ultra successful person who tears through life, jumping from project to project, and somehow managing to use his charm and charisma to manage to make a living. Amazingly enough I actually found myself liking the guy despite his talent for sucking minutes out of your life, pushing you to do things outside the box, and managing to always make you run late.
I guess I should give you some background about what I do in life. I work for an electronics contract manufacturer as a production engineer. Basically I get to try to come up with ways to manufacture stuff, figure out ways to make designs that really smart people have come up with work on our manufacturing shop floor, and manage at least one crisis a day. My working life essentially boils down to bringing order out of chaos (also know as people who have never stepped out from behind their computer screen and actually checked how the part fits in real life!) and trying to help my production supervisors meet our sales guy's fantasy land delivery dates!
Now that you have an idea of what I do, imagine what happened to my life when suddenly a project with a custmer who is demanding, and who know little about how products get made is suddenly dropped into my lap. I spend 90% of my time not on designing the details that make the project successful, but instead trying to get the customer organized enough to tell me what it is he really wants. Around 5% of my time is spent waiting for him to arrive at the specified time of the meeting, and 3 to 4 % is spent repeating and defending what decisions I made to the customer. The final 1% of my time is spent actually engineering. Thankfully I have excellent coworkers who were able to help me get the details straight enough that we could actually make the project start to work the way it was supposed to. I truly think that my customer who is excellent at managing crisis, has to invent crisis to find solution to a problem. This to me seems a rather backwards way of doing business, but for him it works, and I had to adapt to his style if we were going to make this project work.
I didn't realize that i was bringing work home with me, until one night at dinner, the wife (loveley as always!) asked me what I was thinking about, because obviously I had not heard a word she had been saying for the last few minutes. She said that I had completely spaced off, and while she understands that guys sometimes do that when women are talking, this was an abnormally long time for me. I wasn't real sure of what i had been thinking about but just that my thoughts were someplace else. A few nights later, I slept quite poorly, and the realization hit me... I was dreaming about the sounds the laser tag guns make when they are working. I was waking up in the morning, feeling like I had been at work for a full 8 hours, as I had been having work dreams the whole night. You know the kind, the one where you do exactly what you do every day at work, just in your dream, and you never really get any of that big pile of disorganized junk off of your desk. I had dreams like this for around 3 weeks, when we were getting the whole project into production, and then I started to have dreams about getting the parts to our production people! Needless to say, this was very taxing on me, and my wife was getting fed up with it.
The odd thing about this whole situation, is that I fully enjoyed this project, troubles and all, and felt that it taught me a great deal about how to better manage a project, and to become a better engineer. It is amazing to me that something that can be so taxing can also be so rewarding and enjoyable. Either way, I am glad that this project is over for the time being and I can get back to being my normal old self at work. I also think that the wife will like this project being over, as I will no longer just space out for 5 mnutes streches, well at least thats what I will tell her.
Anyway, this was probably not as humorous as most of my posts, but sometimes you need to get a little perspective, you now a little fiber to go with all the pablum. I will now go off to completely enjoy my weekend, and taming the jungle that my lawn has become.
j
posted by Jay at 4:43 PM
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