Diversions Manifold

I'm a pretty good sketcher of words and ideas, but a terrible completer of posts: making sure that the ideas make sense and connect properly, trying to get the wording and the feel right, trying to draw conclusions and lessons from whatever experiences or thoughts I am trying to describe; sometimes even deciding which service to post things on (a ridiculous situation, in all honesty) - that's all hard work, and sometimes I just don't feel that I have the energy to complete it. As a result, my pool of drafts begins to overflow and prevents me from really finishing. So, in the spirit of draining the pool and refreshing my perspectives, here's a dump of my most current drafts, cross-posted on Blogger and on my Micro.blog instance! Rethinking which services I should keep, and why, is something for another day. A review of Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before created 2023-09-06 This is a most typically Umberto Eco book, of an unknown, uncertain narrator reconstru

The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA , the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union. At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. W

ABQP: Advanced Brexit Quality Planning It is surely doing the British Civil Service an injustice to suggest that there was no planning process for Brexit. However, what we see in the media strongly suggests that whatever planning did take place was swiftly overcome by politics: the votes upon votes in Parliament, the pontificating and hardening of views, the dreams shattered and still dearly held. We hear of Papers stating one potential outcome or another, but the feeling remains of a Brexit ship veering ponderously from port to port, turning away from each in disgust without ever reaching one. I'm an automotive engineer, and could imagine Brexit being an automotive project; there would (in my imaginings, anyway) have been a clear baseline for planning, thinking, moulding, approving or even cancelling the project before it's too late. Comparing Brexit with a VW Polo facelift? Ridiculous! Well, yes, but I feel there are some lessons in the processes that w