Well, it’s that time of year again for a Savings Initiative, where the whole team tries to come up with ways to save money on the program. In aerospace, there are three things that can kill a program: cost, schedule, and weight. Any time the program has grossly exceeded one of these limits (i.e. skyrocketing costs, way behind on schedule, or the product weights too much), Program Management delegates a Savings Initiative to identify the causes of these excesses and resolve them. Unfortunately, what management never seems to understand is the conflicting relationship these three areas (cost, schedule, weight) have with each other.
For example, two years ago there was a Savings Initiative on weight. All things fly in Aerospace so they need to be as light as possible. Everyone was asked to brainstorm a bunch of ideas on how to save weight and submit them to management for review. Most of the good ideas were rejected because they only saved a little weight. But some of the really crazy ideas got approved even though they were unlikely to work.
So fast forward to a year later and guess happened? The crazy weight-savings ideas added alot of cost, mostly because they couldn’t be built. So schedule falls behind as we try to fix all the problems the weight-saving ideas created. And that’s where we are now – management has now delegated there be a Savings Initiative for schedule. This Savings Initiative really takes the cake though because management decided to tackle this one on its own. To be continued…
Because everything management tries to fix at the Shitshow creates new and worse problems, I throw rocks.
No comments:
Post a Comment