Company standards for engineering design

[ggcdn]

What follows is a rather boring but important topic.... How do you document your standards?

My engineering team has a lot of Tribal Knowledge, AKA a lot of unwritten procedures, pseudo-standards, and ways of doing things that aren't well documented. A new hire has no way of absorbing this knowledge except by direct interaction and feedback. I'd like to start the process of getting more things formalized and standardized, but am curious what others are doing in this regard.

My current plan is to use our company SharePoint to create a library of standards. These range in complexity from things like a markup and backchecking procedure to things like analysis of two-way slabs in SAFE. SharePoint has its pros and cons but I chose it primarily because we already pay for it and i) easy searching for pages ii) easy linking to pages iii) simple WYSIWYG editor so anyone can create pages.

Anyway, I'm curious how others share their collective wisdom and/or document their standards and procedures, whether anyone has gone through this process, and how it worked out for your team.

Thanks!

-JA
try [link calcs.app]Calcs.app[/url] and let me know what you think

 

[3DDave]

It works if people want it to and if there is someone in charge who wants the company to succeed in using it unlike my own experience of people using it to lock in their authority as the system manager. (like the one who could literally not manage a numbered list, either in SharePoint or a Human factors document for the FAA. They know who they are.)

I would not formalize it out of the gate. Instead just get people used to using it and expect that the majority of the work is in capturing the information and that managing uniformity be an on-going developmental process. Some things are low-hanging and should be suggested as applications. For example - any discreet information should be links, such as material callouts and related documents.

Sounds like Microsoft is getting on the Wiki path 20 years into it. The defect that I saw in SharePoint before was that one could not create links to documents/pages that did not yet exist. This was a real problem as it forced a full bottom-up page creation effort which users didn't want to make and meant that it wasn't possible to easily tell when a link was a pure place-holder or there was at least a token effort made.

For example: If I had a document that has a list of several dozen related documents then I would have to make pages for all the related documents before I could create the links in the document page. The bad news - if those pages get created later but the original document is "locked" then the referenced documents aren't traceable back. In a Wiki, those links would become active automatically.

The result is that any large group of documents, such as for a proposed product, one might have to repeatedly revisit the top level documents to manually edit the links each time a subordinate page is added. How tedious.

 

[Once20036]

I`m a big fan of microsoft one note for things like this.
We have a file saved on our server, everyone can access it, it's easy to use, and it's incredibly searchable.
We use it for the type of knowledge bank that you describe, archiving PDFs from old webinars, our CAD standards, a wish list for new topics, etc.

 

[ggcdn]

@3DDave, Good insights, thanks. I dont think Sharepoint is quite up to par with other wiki software, but its what we have. Yes I can imagine there is a fine line between it being helpful and being a burden. My objective here isn't to use it to micromanage or police people. Ideally this helps people, especially new hires.

@Once, we use OneNote for collaborative meeting agendas and things like that. But as a place to store standards and procedures... I don't know. Seems like it could get unwieldy pretty quick. Do you notice the performance degrade if its loaded up with embedded pdfs and such?

-JA
try [link calcs.app]Calcs.app[/url] and let me know what you think

 

[skeletron]

I worked in a corp that was going through the changeover from "standards in many binders" to "standards in a CMS". It was a huge undertaking because a lot of the process required reviewing/updating/modifying existing standards before they were uploaded. We end up getting into this rabbit hole (as engineers) where everything has to be A+ 100% before committing to it. In this application, this may prevent the wheels from rolling and actually cause them to fall off...The benefit of the process was that the search capability and consistency was improved because everything could be linked/tabbed out. Looking back here are a few things I note:
1/ Everyone has to buy in to the concept as a way to improve/future-proof the department/business/etc.
2/ Company went from a Sharepoint to a third-party CMS because it served them better (something to do with making pages, tagging, etc. that was limited in their existing Sharepoint system)
3/ Filing system is still key. It seems like some people may just dump documents onto the cloud hoping that the search catches the document, but I believe you still need some sort of traditional filing structure
4/ Company hired an educator/tech.writer to really do a lot of the deep dive uncovering (ie. keep the Engineer out of the rabbit hole). This probably adds to the consistency of the standards and also brings a "new hire" attitude in exposing what is known/unknown.
5/ Similar to (4) the Eng. Department also hired new engineers who were the guinea pigs in mapping out each new problem they faced. They're not responsible for establishing the standard, but they do help in uncovering the existing documentation (or lack thereof).

The format of your standards really depends on you and your people. Somethings are conducive to tutorial booklets (ie. How to Model a Two-Way slab in SAFE) while others may be more conducive to flowcharts/checklits (ie. Backchecking procedure). Use the format that fits the goal, but everything should be (in some shape or form) printable.

EDIT: In terms of how-to start, I think you already got a good handle on what things are needed. Slow and steady. Look at your typical workflows and chunk out the different processes you use. Then expand on them with time. I think this is where an educator/tech.writer probably works best.

 

[3DDave]

"the changeover from "standards in many binders" to "standards in a CMS""

What our crack (smoking) team did was eliminate the majority of specific practices, particularly the ones where an engineer could call out a specific manufacturing process. Get rid of the standard manufacturing processes and -poof- QA didn't have do document compliance, making ISO 9001 compliance much easier; cant' fail to follow what no longer exists, right? Plus, they could update any company process at any time and make everyone responsible for knowing what changed. By logging into a proprietary CMS and comparing what they were doing against, well, they didn't leave the old version for comparing.

It wasn't long before upper management was saying "Why aren't the engineers doing a consistent job? Shouldn't they all be getting together and making sure they are all doing things the same way?"

Anyway - the OP may not intend that, but watch very carefully for the snake in the company that will volunteer to take on this burden for that purpose, or explain how the OP needs to concentrate on other things and leave this to them to deal with. That's how it started - can't have engineering spending their time on system management. Next up - must submit all material for review by someone who will need to have multiple meetings to decide if that should be in the system because the data plan they negotiated doesn't have much excess for back-ups so it needs to be constantly pruned to only the most important data.

 

[IRstuff]

Hah! We did that; our design group complained about all the old designs stored on the server and cleaned it right up. Next time we wanted to build the boards, oops; we had to reverse engineer our own boards to build the next lot, and of course, we made mistakes in the reverse engineering since we couldn't destructively inspect the boards as there were no more spares.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[Once20036]

Sonofa - all those PDFs aren't stored within the one note itself, they`re all stored on a server with a clickable link to access the PDF in the one note.