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Bad Boeing - how to go wrooong


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I've just been through a massive project in work. Our company used to belong to a giant bank but has recently go through a management buy out.

We had 5 weeks to establish our own IT infrastructure. My boss and the head of technology came from a project management background and wanted to plan everything out with timings and everything. I wanted to list what needed to be done and just get on with it.

The result? They were sacked, I started doing both their jobs and the project came in on time.

AFAIC most project management does nothing but dilute effort. You either plan for every eventuality which means the plan is too big to be of any use and is fragile to any time slip etc or it's not down to any kind of level to be useful.

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Two or three decades back the business world fell in love with the MBA degree. The MBA was supposed to unlock all the secrets of the universe. At least if you had one, you were expected to know everything important about how to run an organization. This attitude always perplexed me. To me, it seemed that the MBA was nearly the least useful degree in the entire curriculum. Anyway, in my experience I never came across anything so overblown. No doubt some holders of the degree actually are pretty good at what they do, but I suspect that they would be even without the degree. They tend to be pretty sharp, have their eyes and minds open and aren't afraid to listen to their subordinates. You can get some actually useful experience that way.

Michael

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It's a bit of a rose-tinted comparison with the 747 development - it kind of neglects to mention that not only did Boeing bet the whole shop on the 747 but they bloody nearly lost it too - the first aircraft were months late into service, engine and flight characteristic problems had to be fixed, bankers had to roll over on loans, etc.

there's not really a lot of difference now regardless of how people feel about it - ambitious aircraft design has always been like that, and Boeing have done well to get through it - unlike, say, the whole British large aircraft industry from the Brabazon onwards......

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Well, there was a lot of gloating about Airbus' troubles with the A380 at the time, particularly from our Trans-Atlantic Friends. All I can say is I'm happy there were two bananas peels and Boeing seems to have happily obliged.

And I agree with the general tenor that managers managing often do not add value of their own and can frequently get in the way of those who do.

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No, the things just get more and more complex, which leads to an exponential increase in trouble (variances in desired and actual outcome in one component expand against each other).

As long as the things get debugged to the point of none falling down that's all fine.

Of course Americans and Europeans should be better at this than other countries, otherwise we can forget about our lifestyle. But other countries don't even try to make airplanes.

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so what?

that's like saying the 787 isn't complex because the Space Station is an order of magnitude more complex.

We get blase about such things because all we have to do is turn up & expect to have safe, fast & cheap air travel - without having to think about the massive amount of work that goes into every airliner, regardless of size.

Building large passenger aircraft (and 100 seaters _are_ large passenger aircraft!) is a horrendously complex business, especially for a country that has never done it before.

Sure they get partnerships with Boeing or (formerly) Lockheed, or whoever - but that's not hubris - that is necessity, and also commercially driven on the part of hte partners, and technology transfer is tightly controlled and paid for.

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