Diversions Manifold

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

The unvalidated state Well, that all went somewhat awry, didn’t it? I must confess that I was prepared neither for the result of the referendum on Thursday 23rd June nor for its impact on my state of mind. I spent most of Friday, 24th June 2016, in a strangely blank pall of frustration, disbelief, even - briefly - anger, plus an element of intrigue at what the future will bring. Such a complex bubbling brew of emotions will take some time to subside as this weekend peters out into another week, the first of a long, long series of weeks, months and years bringing ructions and repercussions in my homeland along with administrative hurdles and considerations of nationality for me personally. Questioning our sanity Did 52% of Britons really, actively, vote to exit the EU? It doesn’t seem that way: the EU was never really the point during the less than savoury referendum campaign. Those who voted for Leave were sold a dream of “reclaiming our sovereignty” without being told why the

A note to my friends and contacts in the UK Don't leave me stranded on the Continent...! If there have been any verifiable facts in the debate over Britain's referendum to stay in or to leave Europe to its own devices, I missed them. It's all (up to the lamentable murder of Jo Cox, MP) been an ever more unedifying and frankly embarrassing spectacle of bellowings, bawlings and balderdash ratcheting down to the lowest common denominator red-herrings of immigration and outliers on the EU regulations spectrum. So I can't and won't base my thoughts on any clear factual basis. What remain are feelings and conscience, which crystallise in and out as I change perspective. But whatever the perspective, my feelings and conscience compel me to ask you to vote "Remain", if only on the basis that I don't want my life made even more complicated than it already is. About me and my European friends I live and work in Germany. Nope, not in "Europe", but i

A title? A blog post? I’m an inveterate tinkerer with a seemingly innate inability to forget the tools and processes, to concentrate on the message, story or narrative that I want to impart. So I’m no back to trying out Byword on the Mac - back to the rather appealing white text on black (well, a strangely relaxing but equally distracting washed-out green-black that highlights the backlighting system on the display, with all its patches of lighter and darker black, redolent of swimming in a lake with its warmer and cooler patches of water). I still love the idea of distraction-free typing - but I keep on getting tied up with the mechanics of saving and exporting these markdown files. EXCEPT: I’ve just discovered that Byword can publish to Evernote, which is rather a nice little feature, now that I think of it. And it can publish to Blogger… where I’ve had an account and a blog for ages. So Byword really is right for tapping out those disjointed nightly thoughts (which I ha