Planning MS Excel Sheet v. Design MS Excel Sheet
Engineers
succeed not by being engineers all through their career.
Their
success is underwritten by movin-on-up to being a manager, not a technical
manager but a project/program manager; better still, finance or corporate
manager. They get good at planning using spread sheets, ignoring what the
engineers say.
There
was a time in the mid– to late ‘70s, I am talking about IIT Madras, when the
second highest aspiration for graduating engineers was a seat at one of the
then two Indian Institutes of Management, one at Joka (Calcutta; hadn’t yet
been renamed Kolkata) and the other at Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the latter preferred
over the former.
If
the Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Management (what you got then in IIMs was
not a degree, but merely a diploma,), was the second choice, what as the first?
Going to the US, where after getting an MS, people switch to management
degrees.
A
classmate of mine in civil engineering did his MS at a US university, and
promptly did his MBA at the same university. He has been with INTEL ever since.
My
not-so-close relative, a metallurgist (semi-conductor industry) went to the US
with a plum post and within a few years got himself a management degree, just
to switch horses in midstream! No age old proverbs/adages for him!
What
causes the above switch? Why do people undertake this transition from
one-degree-one job to another-degree-another-job? Can it be merely the moolah?
It
is only in the rarest of rare cases (the Indian Supreme Court’s metric for
imposing death penalty) a manager pays the price for her incompetence. Aren’t
their life made already in their, say, mid–thirties or a decade later?
Why
it is hard to climb the corporate ladder if one sticks to core engineering
expertise, while letting in managerial talent seep in only slowly and sideways?
Because, this is a surmise, engineers become inured to taking orders from the
managerial type. Managers ask questions, engineers try to provide answers that
managers pretend not to understand.
“Oh,
you want me to do this, of course, I would, sir.” Thinking to oneself, “My way
is better in every aspect, but the manager is closer to the finance manager who
is closer to the ...”, you look around yourself and tail off in your thoughts.
Yet,
should something fail, the engineer is the bogeyman monster that made the
mistake. The top man in engineering takes the fall, along with his junior
cohorts if they are unlucky. I have been an eyewitness to this, in my career as
an engineering manager in a design consultancy company.
It is not quite a hypothetical, what with Elon
Musk’s rockets having failed twice. As someone said, one is happenstance; twice
is coincidence; thrice is enemy action. Musk, if the next rocket also blows up,
God forbid (from an atheist, no less!), has to find someone to blame.
This
post is not about Elon Musk, though there is boat load of things to write
about. The ‘O’ ring in the Challenger shuttle disaster were not designed for
the cold temperatures obtained at the launch pad on that day.
“...were
not designed ...”. In active voice, “Engineers failed to account for the
possibility of freezing temperatures (in Florida!) at the time of launch.”
There are enough engineers up and down the hierarchy who would be called upon
to share the blame. The top man, definitely a qualified manager, may also be
fired by his/her bass, the shareholders of the company; but he/she has his/her
rolodex. But, even if not, that is just one head to roll, as compared to many
of engineers/technicians and such.
Engineers
are an unprotected lot. No wonder, the profession drives away the capable. So,
if one wished to build up a capable workforce of engineers up and down the
hierarchy, one’s attention shall be on assigning responsibilities rationally.
The critical thing is for the managers to listen to the time frame that the
engineer assigns to his/her task.
You
can rush things on a planning MS Excel sheet but not in the design Excel sheet.
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