Ramp Up Failure

My day plan spoiled by someone approaching me to look for historical data of a complicated project that claim is a failure of the year.

I admit, the project isn’t run smoothly from the beginning, mainly because of technical constraint and competency. When the project sign off from the management board, the whole world know that it is a very complicated project and the risk to fail is high. As the project hand over to me, I don’t have other choice except moving forward, so as the technical engineers in the project team. A lot of effort has been put in by the project team to develop solution and over come the technical constraint. Personally, I feel that their achievement should be recognized and appreciate regardless the end result of the project. Since everybody knew that the risk to fail is high.

The product is now in the mass production stage, yes, we gone through a hard time to stabilize the assembly process over the past six month. Finally, the team can release their hand and it is time to finger pointing. Therefore, somebody started to claim it as a Ramp Up Failure, they start to review the history and search for more evident to support his claim.

According to the definition, Ramp Up Failure in this context mean the project / process not meeting the general target set. Like process yield must be above 98%, machine MTBA must above 60 minute etc. Regardless project complexity.

Since few month back, people started to bring up the topic and discuss or debate. They spend a lot of time in data collection and compilation; spend a lot of time preparing nice Power Point slide; show off their presentation skill in the management meeting, just to prove their statement right. “IT IS A RAMP UP FAILURE”

I m not involved in the discussion; therefore I don’t know how much time and effort spend in debating the case. However, my personal observation, the discussion is totally non value added. The topic will just go round and round and round to fill up the working hour of the peoples that make them looks “value added”.

I feel really disappointed with such management practice. The people in the project team who struggle to bring business for the company were discouraged by the unfair punishment. In fact, they had developed something that difficult to achieve, there are technical breakthrough in the project. Why it is a failure?

In fact, the groups of people who only sit in the meeting room spend time discussing the nonsense are not the qualified peoples to review my project. My argument is; how much they understand the project and product complexity, how much time they spend at the site to personally feel the situation when the technical engineers dirty their hand to fix a problem? How much time they contribute to the project? Do they really understand the root cause and ready accept the fact?

Enough, what ever past is past, no point to argue. Why not you spend more time in your core function?