Lessons Learned via Golden Nuggets

Lessons Learned via Golden Nuggets

One of the enjoyable parts of reliability engineering work is the consistent need to learn. We learn how new materials, designs, applications, and systems work, and fail. Sometimes we learn through proactive characterization studies, sometimes via unwanted field failures.

Failures will occur, it is what we learn from them that matters. The ability to gather and remember the lessons learned is a common and ongoing need for every organization. We are not very good at it, in general.

The Motivation to Create an Effective Lessons Learned System

Years ago, Phil, a technical marketing manager, was called into the general manager’s office. The organization had shipped a new product that was experiencing a very high field failure rate. Instead of the 2 to 5% expected failure rate over the first year of use, the new product in less than two months exceeded 30% failures of all products shipped.

The engineering teams quickly sorted out the root cause and discovered they had systematically fell into a common design paradigm. As Henry Petroski describes in his book Design Paradigms one peril when making a design change to solve a problem, we often then do not set back to determine what else the…