Category: Management and supervision

I’m Jason Firth.

There’s one thing most people don’t know about the law that they should: The law isn’t the same everywhere.

Often, people will talk about “how things are”, as if their experience in their location describes everyone’s. That’s incorrect, and it’s quite dangerous.

In an earlier entry, I talked about what it takes to become a Certified Engineering Technologist, and in another entry, I talked about what it takes to become a red seal Journeyman. I know first-hand about these things because I went through the process in 2013.

However; in 2013, I also made a mistake. I applied for, and achieved, my Certified Engineering Technologist designation in Manitoba. At the time, I didn’t know if I was covered nationwide, so I called the Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists and asked if I could use my designation across the country. They told me it was fine.

They were not being entirely truthful. In 2010, the governments of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario split from the Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists to create Technology Professionals Canada, a new organization dedicated to the profession of Engineering Technology in Canada.

As a result, and as a result of the wording of Section 11 of the Ontario Association of Certified Engineering Technicians and Technologists Act, 1998, S.o. 1998 C.Pr7, the use of the CET designation is restricted and it is an offense for anyone who is not a full member of OACETT to use the title.

Not realizing that the title didn’t automatically transfer like a red seal, I used my CET title in Ontario, only to receive a Cease and Desist letter from OACETT’s lawyers.

In my case, I asked about my options as a member of CTTAM, and the lawyer told me:

1. You can maintain your primary membership in Manitoba and apply to OACETT as an out-of-province member. You will pay full dues to Manitoba. You will need to pay out-of-province member’s dues in Ontario which are one-third of what a regular member pays;

2. You can transfer your membership to Ontario; or

3. You can transfer your membership to Ontario and maintain out-of-province status with Manitoba (assuming Manitoba has this provision).

After paying a small fee, I was able to transfer my membership to Ontario without any further difficulty. It took about a month, during which I stopped using my designation in Ontario.

I ended up taking the third option, transferring my primary membership to the province I practice in, and using an out-of-province membership (at a cost of about $100/yr) in Manitoba.

Something to keep in mind!

Thanks for reading!

I’m Jason Firth.

So, now that oil has dropped dramatically, oil companies are discovering something I’ve always said: You need your own competent people.

The oil and gas industry has found out in a very abstract way: They’ve realized huge cost overruns on projects since they decided to let other companies monopolize engineering competence. When they had their own people working on the projects, they didn’t have the same cost overruns.

There’s a number of reasons why this is the case.

Let’s start off with what I like to call institutional memory. This is the effect of having people who have worked in your facilities for years making decisions about those same facilities. You can’t outsource institutional memory. It’s something that either belongs to you, or is lost. When you’re making decisions that affect the short-term viability of a project or the long-term viability of a facility, there’s a million tiny facts which you need to know, and you won’t learn in a 2-day site visit. Those folks don’t know about the fifteen other solutions that were tried on a problem until the sixteenth worked. They’re stuck asking why something is done a certain way. Sometimes this means they’ll be going back to the failed solution 1.

Then, there’s the pure question of “Who do you work for?” — An outside company will always be looking out for their own bottom line. If a conflict arises between the interests of your company and theirs, they are going to be more likely to act in their best interests.

Along those same lines, if you’re dealing with your own talent, then you can make sure you’ve got the best talent on the most important jobs. I’ve seen it in the past where an outside firm will wow a client with the A-team, then once the contract is signed, send in the Z-team.

Speaking of contracts: Of course everyone agrees that scope creep is dangerous. However; there’s a certain flexibility that comes with dealing with your own people that allows economies. For example, I was working on one big project with an engineering firm, and another different project was going on at the same time. The engineering firm refused to do anything that wasn’t part of the plan without negotiating a scope change and fee increase. Meanwhile, I plugged two cables in, successfully connecting the projects together, and changed a couple lines on a CAD drawing.

The formality of dealing with another company can also be a danger when you rely on other firms to have your competence. While working for a company, there’s been a number of times when I’ve been working on some skunkworks for a company alongside the main, official jobs. Skunkworks is a term that comes from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works development group, which developed the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk, and the F-22 Raptor. The designation is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects. The concept of that autonomy and relaxation of bureaucracy is incompatible with the formality of a business to business arrangement.

All of these problems reduce economies and prevent innovation within companies, and facilities. You can’t outsource your institutional memory to another company. Your employees will always be the most aligned to your interests. You are only in full control of your own employees. Contract work can be inflexible and cause large cost increases. You can’t give other companies autonomy the way you can give your employees autonomy.

Thanks for reading!

I’m Jason Firth.

Today, when people use the word “Connected”, they’re usually talking about ethernet networks. That’s not what I’m talking about today.

Quite often as an instrument technician or technologist, I get asked to help participate in jobs that don’t immediately appear to be related to my trade. In one case, I was asked to participate in the Reliability Centred Maintenance initiative. In another, I was asked to help set up a site’s maintenance management system. A lot of people heard this, and immediately went “That’s not in your job description!”

As much as that might be true (depending on how the job description is worded), I belive that everything we do is connected.

Let’s look at the workflow for RCM. The very first task is to get a complete list of equipment at your site. Occasionally you already have that list, but often you do not. At one site I worked at, gathering a list of equipment was a massive undertaking, requiring cross-referencing of every single piece of information available, from the existing maintenance management system, to maintenance records, to data from the PLC and SCADA, to some good old fashioned leg work. This might not be part of the job description, but it certainly makes life easier having that information. Suddenly we know exactly what we have, where we didn’t before.

The next task is to sit down with operations personnel, and get them to help define the function of every piece of equipment. You record that definition for later. Let’s look at the incredible value you get here: Not only do you personally get to sit down and learn one at a time exactly what operations believes each piece of equipment does, but you’re recording it so anyone can look it up. You can gather this information together later to improve operations documentation, or to add invaluable context to the PLC or DCS program, or to produce complete disaster planning.

Next, you determine the dominant failure modes; the scenario for each failure mode; criticality of each failure; what the consequences are of failure; and what maintenance will be done to address each failure. This might seem incredibly specific to preventative maintenance, but imagine the value in having this available on a minute-to-minute basis. Imagine getting a trouble call and knowing immediately how it can be prioritized in a situation where multiple breakdowns are occurring. Having that information closely at hand could mean the difference between a plant facing safety hazards, environmental impact, capital damage, or productive loss, and not.

Finally, by having an instrument guy in the room, sometimes new solutions to failures can be found. Systematically discussing everything with operations personnel and other maintenance personnel can be a great catalyst for innovative solutions to problems that have plagued a site for ages.

As for helping to improve a maintenance management system, that’s something you don’t realize you needed until you have it. A properly set up system will have all your different pieces of equipment, so you can build a history of things you’ve done to that equipment. History is a key information source in Reliability Centred Maintenance. A really well done MMS will fundamentally change how reactive maintenance gets done. When a tradesman recognise that a piece of equipment needs to be changed out, instead of immediately hunting for some indication of what the part they need is, they can immediately head to stores with the tag number and recieve the exact part they need from the asset Bill of Materials.

These are just two examples of how things that don’t seem to be at all connected to what we do can nonetheless make our day to day work easier. “That’s not in your job description!” is a great way to make that job harder.

Thanks for reading!