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Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

(OP)
found here, engineering principles to arrive at cost.- aand energy saving designs:
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/10xe%20principles

My thoughts: This is all nice and well, but hard to do in any environment I've seen so far. All these suggestions boil down to throwing more engineering time at a problem. Some principles require the end-user to spend significant time to identify costs and benefits, provide data etc. In all likelyhood the end user is busy allready and hired some consultants to do the development work for them.
The Rule to use data and models instead of rules could require more modelling skills than some engineers have and at the end of the day industry codes will mandate adherence to certain rules anyway.
And every company I worked so far had some compartmentalization going where you are activle discouraged from spending time on issues outside your expertise or department, making this cross-disciplinary work harder.

The sad thing is that personally I like most of the ideas behind these rules, and the philosophy of always looking at a complete process. I think a set of written down design rules can be helpful until one has ingrained good practices, and maybe moreso when you ingrained bad practices. Most of these 10xE principles make some sense but are hard to impossible to implement as a sole contributor, they basically need the engineers/designers + their management + the client on board.

And while looking at end-uses and whole processes may be a great way to design an efficient process, to the one paying the engineering bill (or salary) this will have 'scope creep' written all over it.

I wonder if there are types of projects where this kind of engineering is more doable, and if these principles are actually that practicable. And wether defining (any) principles has a relevant impact vs. the choice of engineers to do the work.

Also, the '10xE' sounds like desperate salesmanship.

RE: Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

These principles are not particularly new, as the bulk of them form the core of classical systems engineering best practices. These are one of the reasons that military systems cost more than consumer goods; most military developments go through some, if not all, of the cited principles, but consumer goods and products tend to be get shorted on these. Sadly, even some military systems short-cut these principles to save cost.

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RE: Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

Industry has adopted similar nonsense in a big way with various-titled "gate" systems. I regularly see non-technical industry magazines talking about FEED (i.e., Front End Engineering Design) processes on projects. FEED is just a stage-gate in a multi-step process. As IRStuff says, this is adding huge costs to every project. I would add "while adding minimal to negative value". All of these brand new ideas are trying to make mediocre project teams perform like the superstars. Ain't going to happen. The reason that the super-star projects succeed is far more about team adaptability and responsiveness than process. If a team member on a super-star team sees a nascent fire developing, he puts the damn thing out and moves on to the next fire. On a process-driven team that same team member would be forced to fill out a form, call a meeting, get consensus, and then fight a forest fire.

Nonsense like this is a symptom in the horribly increasing costs I see in industry an wrote about in New Processes are Needlessly Reducing the Recovery from Onshore gas Fields.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

RE: Thoughts on RMI's 10xE engineering principles?

I read these things and sort of treat them like architecture student manifestos - interesting in idea but ultimately useless without some real world examples.

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