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!)

The Electronic Heart-Beat.

All the talk for a while has been on social media, and how it is changing how we interact.  And if I am honest, for a while I didn't get it.  The reports were saying that over 35's didn't realise why it was important, and under 35's couldn't understand why the over 35's didn't get it.  One of those things like the fact that the young folk in the pubs now seem to spend their time texting people in different pubs rather than interacting with the people they are actually with.

I think I now "get it".  When I found that 4 of my friends scattered around the world were on Facebook, and I could be in touch informally, with the funny, day-to-day you would say to them if they were beside you but  never  bother to email.  And having used it for a good six months, it's nice to be in contact, even if fleeting.

Taking the Long Way Home

It's a song by the Dixie chicks, but it was kind of appropriate for last weekend.  To be fair, our "plight" was not exactly desperate, we were due to fly out on Thursday to Manchester and thence to Aberdeen, when the airspace was closed.  Nobody was too sure what was going on, so we got ourselves rebooked onto the next flights on Friday, on the assumption that things would literally blow over.

Friday saw it worse, and it didn't look as though Manchester would be open all weekend, so we pored over the Volcanic Ash Advisory Service diagrams (who even knew this existed?) and reckoned that if we could get onto the Cork/Glasgow flight, both of those should be open, so we would stay put another day.

7:30 on Saturday morning, we found we had to change this plan of inaction.  If we could get onto a 8:30 train to Belfast, we might make the 17:00 ferry to Stranraer and at least be in Glasgow by the evening.  The rest of the day was spent effectively double-guessing whether we could make the next part of the journey, hoping not to miss one of our relatively short connections, and trying not to get too annoyed at the inconvenience.  And 28 hours after we left, and having used 2 taxi's, 3 trains, 1 tram, 1 bus and 1 rickshaw (well, only joking on the rickshaw), we got back to Aberdeen.  And we were still 3 days early compared to the airborne route.

Looking at it from the risk assessment point of view, it's quite interesting.  The rule for ash was quite clear, any ash = no fly.  From our point of view as process engineers, that's like saying that the lowest risk is when there is no production, although there is also no benefit either.  It looks as though they are feeling towards a point where there is some risk, but how do you define if it's acceptable?  Or as low as reasonably practicable?  Are all the pilots and air-crew really on-board that it's now safe?  Will Ryanair really do a full check on all engines after every flight?  Is that reasonable?  Practicable?  Who's fault would it be if an emergency now happens?  It'll be interesting to watch it as it goes on.  As long as we can get away on our holiday in July.