Avoid rushing

In today’s society where our impatience can get the better of us, we have become accustomed in doing things quicker. There is a difference in being quick at completing a project or product development. Being quick is down to improved efficiency and sufficient planning whereas rushing is just trying to sprint without thinking things through properly. The end goal should be to do things quicker if it is achievable.

Here are some reasons why you should avoid rushing in your projects.

Delays:It sounds counter intuitive but rushing in on a project can cause delays and take longer to complete than if you were to work towards a realistic timeframe.

Costs:As mentioned earlier the further along you are in your design the more expensive your mistakes will be. You may get lucky and just need to drill a larger hole because you got your fit tolerances wrong, but you can risk to a whole subsystem having to be completely reworked. Plus, machinists can charge you extra for urgent work. But also, time booked to a project is sometimes forgotten. You might think you can do things within 80 hours when it was recommended to schedule 120 hours and end up with having to spend more hours in debugging and resolving issues.

Safety: If you rush things, you are more likely to make mistakes by not following proper procedures as you are cutting corners. This could lead to injuries while working around equipment or accidentally overlooking dangerous design features. Even if human safety is not at risk, you should consider machine safety as you could risk damaging them which will lead to increased costs and delays due to downtime. In addition, you could accidently break components as you are not taking your time in carrying out tasks properly. Plus, you could risk legal sanctions due to unsafe working practices by cutting corners.

It’s good to aim to be lean and do things as quickly as possible but just remember that rushing through things for the sake of being is not always worth it in the long run and as mentioned in some our examples you are just going to put your project and mission at risk.

Here are some solutions that can help you be more efficient and avoid rushing.

Proper planning: List out exactly what is required in a project and have the requirements, scope, deliverables, and timeframes signed off by the team and customer.  Make the plan Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Time bound, known as SMART. Carry out road mapping, map the process of the product in it’s environment and operation, carry out risk assessments, testing plans etc. Roadmaps, risk assessments and plans will help you think things through and in some cases allow you to eliminate waste in your processes thus making you more efficient.

Training: Train your team and yourself in new skills relevant to the project. Time honing new skills will make you and your team more effective in tackling the project so the time and monetary costs will pay dividends in the future.

Ask for support: Ask experts who can help you find the solution to your projects. An experienced head can help you avoid mistakes or prep you before you undertake the project so you will be more aware of potential pitfalls and avoid technology dead ends. Don’t always try and figure it all out on your own as that will make things take longer and make you more inclined to rush other things.

Avoid excessive meetings: Meetings can be useful at keeping up to date with progress and identifying solutions to problems, but weekly update meetings can be a waste of time as in my experience there is little planning ahead in the new week and very few people pay attention or remember the last one.  

Don’t reinvent the wheel: Sometimes it’s best to buy components off the shelf instead of developing parts from scratch. This was a major issue with the Claymore deployer as I was trying to design everything from scratch but decided later to incorporate off the shelf components. This also includes documentation, use templates if you have to instead of doing them from scratch.

Go back: If you are in a dead end with a concept and you have exhausted all ideas to fix it then it is best to go back to older concepts that were previously overlooked. In R&D things change and more knowledge about the problem has become available. That extra knowledge you and the team gained will allow you to get a new concept to the advanced stages quicker than your initial concept.

Rest: Don’t try and work crazy hours or nonstop. Take breaks, go for a walk to get away from the problem. In my experience I have came up with solutions while not working on the problem and it helped me speed up my progress.

Lessons learned: Use your previous experience in your career or in previous projects, you will be surprised how you can reuse similar concepts for various challenges. For example I used my experience in developing automotive, semi-conductor and aerospace components for the Claymore deployer.

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