Re: Design checklist?

From: <Christopher>
Date: Mon Jun 11 2001 - 20:40:00 EDT

>Read the part of the contract that concerns yu as a designer.
I'll just add a little bit to this, starting with asking yourself what you intend to accomplish with a check list. Ask the question both ways--'What would happen if you _didn't_ have a check list? If you can't answer that question, find something else to do because you need to know what you expect to accomplish before you can know if you're finished. You may find out at this stage that your boss tasked you with this in order to appear more managerial, which isn't a very good reason to do a checklist.

You might also want to think of instances where checklists are used and why. Generally, they end up as tools to formalize long routines to make sure things are always done the same way in the same sequence, so that something important isn't overlooked. This isn't usually the way engineering design works. Design cycles are ordinarily unique to an office and to a particular job. Trying to force a job to fit the mold of previous work usually isn't very productive. There are lots of fairly routine sub-tasks, but an entire design sequence is seldom repeated, except in the most general way.

About the best you can do is sit down and plan out the job from finish to start. List the deliverables for the job, then back through each one the see what specific item is needed to complete each deliverable item, then the item next before and so on back. What you'll have is a work plan and with a little extra effort you can see which tasks are the milestones which need to form the checklist. Add dates and dollars and it'll look an awful lot like an organized approach--probably better than a checklist..

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant from <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=f91VidWVG3fWCC6rjJKe0LrJjUEFB1z5HhLzGuUXofy6ORC4NATbB5VCO3vPzZYxJUVM6o0R48Z7NN4">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)

<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw</a> Received on Mon Jun 11 20:40:00 2001