Have you ever been assigned an impossible task?
 

A while ago a contract millwright was working in the plant and put the wrong sized bolts in a machine. it failed. He later admitted he knew the bolts were the wrong size but he figured they'd work.
he wasn't working for me but there was a big investigation.
Long story longer, a recommendation from the investigation was to "Develop a system that will verify that the correct parts are being utilized in all equipment before it is deemed ready for service".
It may sound easy to the layman but in reality it is so complex it makes my head hurt just contemplating the ramifications.

It was assigned to me because I'm the SME and it came from very high up.

Two choices, one is to put some worthless sound-good cliche ridden procedure together and send it out and be ashamed to have my name on it, or two: work diligently for the next several years to re-vamp the entire maintenance practices of the industry, spending millions of dollars in the process.

I hate that.
I'm pushing back.

many many times...i think its common in the legal profession...boss takes a client for some personal/business reason even though the case has zero chance of winning...boss gives case to me so that he doesnt have to have his name on the papers or make ridiculous arguments to judge and can blame me when case loses and client gets very very mad...one of the reasons being unemployed and homeless is better than my past jobs..i never want to work for anybody ever again

shyte flows downhill as they say...

I'm married. Nuff said.

Yes.

In college, I got a job as a college painter. I was flattered when they hired me as a manager. I was young and naive.

As a manager of a crew, I was assigned to a salesperson (a full-time employee of the painting company), and my job was to paint the houses he sold paint jobs to.

The time we were given to paint a house was determined by the dollar amount of the job. The dollar amount was literally divided by some magic number to determine the number of man-hours allowed to complete a job.

After about the third house--the third house we completed days behind schedule, it became painfully obvious that it would take a super-human effort to complete the jobs on time, or we would have to lie about how much time it took us and not get paid for the overrun.

I later found out that my salesguy had gone from the worst salesguy in the company to the best salesguy in the company that year. He had done that by under-selling his jobs. That meant that I had less time to complete the jobs than I should have.

Of course, being a naive college kid, I didn't figure this out at the time. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. It was a naive college kid against a 10-year employee of the company. I would have lost.

Nope, I was demoted from manager to painter and put on another crew. Most of my crew was fired. None of this was done with any discussion with me ahead of time.

Ever been to Sequoia in DC? I worked there for a week. A boss who really had it in for me told me to go get a bottle of wine from a place I couldn't get into without a key. Other manager who held the keys told me I wasn't allowed in there. First manager told me to get the wine or I was fired. Other manager said if I went in there, I was fired. She didn't give me the keys either.

It's a shame you can't treat him like a PE. Like in the "screw up willfully, or even negligently - you'll be happy if the job is the only thing you lose" way. If it's a journeyman, shouldn't you be able to pull his card?

This problem (expedient fix on the floor/in the field) is a cause of how many accidents, megabucks wasted and lives lost?

I deal with this stuff daily in the explosives testing/nuclear materials world. We spend five times the time and money checking the work than we do doing the work. Kills me to have to do that....

In the area of "Impossible", I was recently asked to spec a vacuum pump that was "better" than the infinite(?) vacuum of space.

No this wasn't some exotic UltraHyperSuperStupendousHighVacuum stuff for an exotic instrument. We were just trying to empty a bottle from 1 bar to about 0.01 bar as quickly as possible.

When the requester is 2nd from the top at a national lab, it was hard to keep my reaction discreet enough to keep my job.

Oh he's gone all right, but the task assigned to me is "to ensure we have no future re-occurrences".
Since he was a contractor he was easy to let go. If he was a company employee he would still have his job even though the cost to the company for his poor judgment was probably in the high six figure range.

I can't develop a system or procedure or series of checklists to prevent willful and intentional wrongdoing. He knew better and did it anyway. You can't fix that with paper or words.

I suppose I could write a policy that states an armed guard has to follow each and every craftsman in the company 24 hrs/day (all 4000 or so of them) and shoot to kill if they fail to follow the thousands of policies and practices and guidelines we already have and train extensively on, but I don't think the union would agree to that ;)

Push back, but offer a "risk based approach". The chance of the chassis of the machine being wrong is probably nil, so focus on the parts that *could* be wrong....wear parts, replacement parts, fixtures that people can change, etc. Then focus on the likelihood of that being wrong (we change it every day = high vs it hasn't been touched in 3 years = low) and the impact of the error (wrong bolt = 40 hours down time = $$ and the machine needs $$ repairs vs. one dude needs to take an early lunch while it's being fixed). Every high risk thing gets checked every day/hour/week and every low risk thing gets checked once a year on a cyclical basis.

I don't know anything about your shop but something like that is practical and can show that you're thinking about it without creating an impossible costly solution. If necessary, assign $ numbers to his idea vs. a risk based approach.

My boss in San Diego and I butted heads. She didn't understand the business, or my role. And I'm not a political type.

She assigned me a task I think was intended to end my career there. Unfortunately, she under estimated me and my team. Some of those team members had been on my previous team, and they all had large, unexpected bonuses. They bent over backwards to help me.

I think you need to "weather" the storm. Then go for a cost savings later.

What about a peer review process?

Standardize the parts and don't let any other parts in the plant.

I love that stuff. Love it (my) death! When we got findings in audits, we'd have to write up corrective and preventive actions. Corrective actions are easy - just fix the problem. Preventive? Just how is a menial process engineer like me going to conjure up a system by which the sin will never happen again?

Usually I'd write a stern memo reminding everyone not to F-up, then I'd hope nobody would F-up until the auditors forgot about whatever they were wound up about.

(this is not about super-important-avoiding-Chernobyl stuff)

For lots of things, you've got it. Whatever you spend overspecifying things, you save 10x in not having to defend yourself later.

Great lean engineering there...

(seriously)

Aren't parts and original parts OEM? Set up a procedure to procure all future parts from an OEM supplier. I assume yer not using off the stuff Home Depot stuff, or maybe u are.

sammy,

How about saying that the bolt ought to thread in its mating part for a depth at least 1 times its diameter with no excessive play.

What kind of f-up did the millright do? I'm a mechanic where I work & want to make sure I do things right.

Color coding? Draw colors around the parts and then have someone paint the bolt heads?

Management will believe that...

When he is promoted, revert.

i working in motion graphics right now. so i am supposed to do the impossible by definition. but in the low budget hell i'm stuck in producers routinely have no concept of the time and effort actually involved in just fixing their crapping footage to get to the point where i can start building the effect.

OK, here's the details:
This was a vertical deep well pump with a 4 piece ridgid coupling.
The motor sits on top of the pump and the solid coupling not only transfers the torsional power, but also provides the lift to keep the pump rotor centered axially in it's stationary parts. The motor acts as a radial bearing and also a thrust bearing.

The coupling takes hex head cap screws (bolts) to hold it's parts together.
The female holes drilled and tapped in the coupling parts are 7/16" NC.
The millwright didn't have any 7/16" bolts handy (they are not that common in this industry but I had them in my shop) and instead of asking his supervision to get some (which might have taken 10 minutes to round up) he grabbed some 3/8" NC bolts and tried them. He wanted to get the job done so he could co home on time.
The 3/8" bolts have a different thread per inch count so they grabbed.
He tightened them up and they seemed to work OK so he said to himself that'll work.
This was a small 12 stage centrifugal pump designed to provide high discharge pressure but relatively low flow. it was in critical service.
It had a spare pump but the spare was out of service waiting for parts to repair it. The OEM didn't support the model anymore so we had outside vendors replicating the parts.

We started the process unit up after the maintenance was done and the 3/8" bolts held for a while, but eventually broke and damaged this pump.
Without the spare pump to go to, we lost production. $$$$$$$
If he had asked his supervision for the right bolts this would not have happened.

Even a really bad mickey-mouse mechanic knows better. This guy was making $34 an hour. No excuses.

The way we do it in the Air Force for aircraft, etc...is have a 7-level inspect completed tasks on critical or dangerous items before they can be put into use. Most journeymen are a 5-level. They earn this distinction through a combination of training and hands on experience. A 7-level is an earned distinction that usually comes with more experience. demonated maturity, and a bit of QC training. In industry, one would expect it to pay slightly better.

OMG! bringing up some memories. i had a crap "team leader" on my first project at my current job. i was straight out of school, and very nervous. i had to organize a paving job..well re-paving job, where a local complained of a huge puddle in front of his business. i surveyed the area, and put some spray marks on the curb, so the paver can simply "hit the marks" and the water would flow downhill. has a newb, i over thought it. i had excel worksheets and graphs, illustrating my survey points, and showing the water running downhill..no biggie. enter jackarse: he saw my marks, and said..i had to maintain a 6" curb..and NO! i couldnt pay for some AC grinding. the dude wanted water to run uphill..i did my best, and the huge puddle became a small puddle, and i had a short curb. he threw me under the bus with the boss. i got called in. i pulled out all my notes, my excel sheet, my plan..and photos. and explained the situation. i simply said, "jackass here wants me to defy the laws of physics..." i was pissed. i was cleared..at the end of the meeting i said, "who was the idiot that messed up and put the puddle there in the first place?" silence.. i still work for the same boss, and we get along. the team leader has been fumagated.

My impossible task was small scale stuff. The owner of the company decide I should get a new title, Production Manager. It did not come with a raise of any sort, just a lot more work. I was supposed to supervise all the employees, do the quality control for the entire place and still do all of my regular work. I tried for a few weeks and saw that it would require me to work 12 hour days. I told him it was a impossible task and he had a choice, I could supervise and produce nothing, or I could go back to my job and he can find another production manager. Since my job production was the start of 70% of the work he hired a production manager at a full salary. If I had been offered that much more money I would have done the 12 hour days.

When I was in college, I shot photos for the campus newspaper. A new 11,500 seat arena had been built and they wanted a shot of the interior. Without setting anything up with the arena management, they sent me down there on short notice and told me they needed the photo in a very short amount of time. Naturally, when I got there, the place was locked down completely. I managed to essentially break into the place but the arena was pitch black and there was nobody around to turn the lights on. I figured my flash wasn't going to be enough light...

JR

Was his name Primitive Pete?

I mean seriously what was this guy thinking?

They are asking you for legal and CYA eyewash, that's all. Write up a generic policy putting the onus on the employee and they will be happy. Maybe require another employee or supervisor to sign off on items deemed critical or some similar crap.

The guy giving this to you just needs to be able to say he "took care of it".

Um, get a white board, some markers and have each repair photographed and signed off on.

Then suggest that all bolts, nuts, screws should be converted to the metric system. These fractional sizes are getting real old!