Jonathan R. Wood - ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT SEMINARS

Dr. Wood offers a one-day seminar which is designed to improve the effectiveness of engineers and engineering managers. The seminar is divided into three parts. Parts I and II are covered in the morning session. The afternoon session covers Part III, as well as a review and open discussion of issues confronted by seminar attendees.

Part I covers The Essence of Engineering.

Part II covers The Essence of Engineering Management.

Part III covers The Essence of Thoroughness.

Part I:

In the hustle and bustle of attempting to carry out a successful engineering design in minimum time, most people focus on only one or two aspects of the engineering endeavor, with consequent ineffectiveness and frustration.

Most people have a sense that all projects take longer to complete than originally envisioned, and that things have a remarkable tendency to go "wrong" (at the most inconvenient time). After completing a formal course of education, most beginning engineers feel highly motivated and entirely ready to carry out a design, and they often expect that an untested design will work flawlessly at first try. But it never does.

Engineering is a multidisciplinary challenge. Not only does it involve the application of diverse and numerous technical disciplines (such as thermodynamics, stress analysis, fluid mechanics, system dynamics, etc.), but it involves the simultaneous and sustained application of seven aspects of human endeavor, which, taken together, embody the essence of engineering .

Here, in summary form, are the seven main aspects which together make up the Essence of Engineering:

Synthesis
Analysis
Awareness
Compromise

Ingenuity
Discipline
Iteration

These seven essential aspects apply in all engineering projects, over a wide range of technical disciplines. Whether you are designing a bridge, or a building, or an airplane, or a vehicle, or a computer, or an electronic power converter, or a software-based system controller, you will need to apply all seven of these principles in your work, simultaneously, and it will help you and the project if you understand that.

The purpose of Part I of this seminar is to impart an understanding of this essential nature of engineering. Typically, a graduating engineering student has an excellent grasp of one of these seven major aspects, i.e., engineering analysis, and may have an innate motivation for another essential one, synthesis. The other five aspects are usually learned over time, the hard way. The quicker that all seven aspects are understood, together with the ability to practice all of them simultaneously, the better off will be the budding engineer and everyone associated with him or her. ( MORE --> )