Processes

I chose the title of this blog to be deliberately vague, as there are a number of ways that the "Process" word applies to my life.

Firstly, my qualification is in Chemical and Process Engineering.  In the oil industry, we tend to refer only to the process part of this title, and all chemical engineers are called "Process Engineers" (when they're acting as chemical engineers that is.  One of the joys of the Chemical Engineering degree is that a fair number of us end up with lots of other job titles.)

Secondly, a lot of what I do is more related to how things get done, as workflows, rather than simply joining unit operations together to make a process.

Thirdly, we tend to take information from a lot of sources, process it, and come up with conclusions and recommendations.  Not to mention how hard it can be sometimes to see how what makes sense to us adults is processed and fed back in a slightly different form by our children.

And finally, I'm getting quite interested in photography, and while we no longer send photos off to the lab to get processed, a lot of the art of good photography now is how you take the raw pictures and using Photoshop or whatever, process these into good photographs.

So that's kind of where I'm coming from.  What's your part?

Looking a few moves ahead

I used to play chess at school, even was part of our school chess team.  Suffice it to say that there was not severe competition for places on the team, and I used to play black on the last board: on the sixth board of six, it was a gamble to try to place me up against a weaker player on the less preferred colour, thus winning some surprise points at the end.  It did work, and we had some good fun in the process.  Remember that this was the days before immersive computer games, Facebook, and that it rained a lot in southern Ireland (and the chess club was indoors and dry).

What I remember of my style of chess play was that I tended to play very aggressively, hoping to win before I ran out of pieces.  We never played timed games, we got to leave the all-boys school, and my style of play meant I finished early and had some time to chat to the opposite team, even if they happened to be female.

What brings me to this trip down memory lane?  Well, my daughter is now getting towards the age where she could start learning chess, and the Lewis Chessmen exhibition in Aberdeen whet my appetite.  My chess board is safely in the loft, but I saw a chess game on Amazon for my PC at a highly competitive cost (less than a fiver), and I bought it.  The game allows you to pit yourself against simulated players of similar ranking to yourself.  So I've been playing for about a week now.

My ranking is not improving much, and part of the problem is that I'm not in the mode of watching the rest of the board, and get quite caught up with my own strategy, becoming quite surprised when I suddenly lose my queen, or find myself in checkmate, seemingly out of nothing.  I'm sure I'll improve with practice, but I guess that given that I was used to winning as often as not 20 years ago, I need to get back into the way of thinking about it.

It made me wonder about whether we're the same at work.  Do we spend a lot of time looking one move ahead, not trying to figure out what the big picture is, and arranging our attack and our defence accordingly.  Do we not see the risks of losing our key players to the opposition, just because we are not focusing on the correct part of the board.  And can we improve this if we practice?  What would that practice look like?

Stunt Driving for Engineers

The tasks for 2011 (and it's already one month in) are threefold for us.

• Make the sales process better/slicker/more effective
• Make the recruitment and retention process better/slicker/more effective
• Make the delivery and quality processes better/slicker/more effective.

We're being tasked with growth, which needs more leads and sales to sustain, more people to deliver, and good delivery to sustain and drive onwards.  And we need to do them all in parallel and in sync.  No real challenge then.

It feels a bit like some of those stunts with Lee Major, where you are driving three cars along a track and jumping from one to the other.  If one car is not in the right place, or slows down, then it's a long jump!  So full speed ahead!  Glad the road ahead is straight (but then again, it's probably bumpy as well!)