Communication Tip

Properly facilitating a meeting is crucial to being productive. Too many times when intelligent people enter a room off topic discussions can occur.  People go on tangents, and although they may be important to the individual, the team or group had another topic in mind. Also without being adequately organized the group may enter heated debates or arguments.

To avoid these issues during meetings a total quality approach should be taken. This model is outlined in detail in “Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence” by James R. Evans and William M. Lindsay. I have also found this website that describes this meeting approach at:

http://calcorps.berkeley.edu/sites/campuslife.berkeley.edu/files/How-To_Facilitate_Effective_Meetings.pdf

From personnel experience, the most important steps are to clearly define the objective and to have a facilitator that writes on the board or projector and keeps everyone focused on the objective. All of the roles defined in the total quality method are important but the facilitator needs to apply good communication techniques and leadership skills and is the most vital. In my group at work we have been following these easy tips and have cut meeting time down and eliminated irrelevant debate.  

TurboCare

Emerging companies in the global steam turbomachinery market are learning and mimicking our SMART seal technology. To remain as the World leader in after market turbomachinery components we need to continuously improve service response time, quality process, and advanced technology for entire turbine rerates. As we continue to grow our operations, we need to work together as one company with a common goal of providing the best products. We have an extraordinary amount of technical knowledge from years of experience. Groups need to utilize this fact and work together to overcome larger, exciting projects in the future. This ability will allow us to effectively redesign entire turbines and maximize customer efficiency gains opening a unique door in the evolving market.

Communication at Work

At work we recently had a break down in communication for a large multi facility project located in Turkey. All of the new parts were manufactured in various locations in the U.S., then shipped to Poland for final fitting and assembly, and finally shipped to the customer in Turkey. Most engineering departments did not receive the schedule until much of the design work was complete and prints were sent to the shop. In turn, parts were made and shipped out of the assembly order. This caused the small Poland facility to store huge parts it was not ready for and to scramble to meet customer deadlines for the parts they needed first. On top of that, this was a full redesign and certain assembly issues arise that need to be machined in the repair facility. The polish engineers have a hard time communicating in English so I was given the opportunity to stay out there and help communicate problems to the appropriate facility as they developed. We had some contractual delays but the overall assembly and turbine start up date have been maintained (the customer is still assembling the piping to the unit). In the end our company learned to have engineering departments communicate more freely without the “middleman” and I found an interest in overseeing whole projects rather than designing specific parts. This was the largest project for our group to date and we will be reviewing all the areas we can improve on in the future.