Monday morning was pretty tough! I arrived back from Houston just after midnight on Sunday night and so didn’t get to bed until around 1am, not great when you have to get up for work at 6am! That said I was lucky to get back at all since there were some problems with flights going through Charlotte( a stop off I was meant to make between Houston and Indy). There had apparently been some really bad weather earlier in the day and this had backed a lot of flights up, to the point where mine was actually cancelled! This is not the greatest news to hear 1000 miles away from home and only 14 hours away from the start of work! Luckily American Airlines booked me onto another flight to Indianapolis that night. It actually worked out quite nicely for me as this was a direct flight and got in 10 minutes earlier than my cancelled journey, crisis averted!
I am now into the third week of project. I had hoped to make a bit more progress this week, but for various reasons this hasn’t come about. Due to the fact that I am reliant on other people for significant portions of the information I need it can be frustrating if I cannot get a hold of these people (through no fault of their own). All the audits must be considered and scrutinised on a case by case basis by myself, Manufacturing Engineer Dave Barnes and Quality Engineer Cindy Appleget. I realised very quickly that Cindy is an incredibly busy person who is often being pulled in all sorts of different directions. Her time is very precious, so I need to try and make sure that when I can get hold of her that I make the most of it. As well as the actual technical aspect of this project, I have had to concentrate hard and put a lot of effort into the organization and management of these meetings. At different points in the meetings there can be debatable and contentious issues, this can lead to long conversations which have the potential to deviate from the subject in hand. I have realised that I must be acutely aware of such situations so that I can attempt to refocus the meeting and achieve a speedy resolution. I now have the confidence to be able to do this and as such the short amounts of time I do have access to these knowledgeable people are becoming increasingly productive.
On Thursday of this week I was unexpectedly called to attend a meeting concerning R-Type Compressor Vanes. This was in relation to some data I had compiled at some point last week with reference to deviations from the set tolerances on these parts. It was my job to compile this raw data into a format that was easy to read and compare. I was a little bit nervous about this meeting as I did not really know why I was having to attend, I was really hoping I hadn’t messed up somehow! I turned out that everything was ok and all I had to do was explain what I had done and the changes that I had made when new data became available. It was actually a great experience to be in the meeting as there was some fairly fierce debate and questioning flying back and forward (none of it calling into question the quality of the data compilation I might add!). It was great to see how important it was to consider the opinions of several different departments whilst making decisions. Although this means that although a longer time is taken when coming to a consensus, it is much more likely to be an accurate and acceptable decision.
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