If your product works, is it a success? During our conversation with Les we learn that is not necessarily the case as we discuss the various elements of a project that all need to succeed in order for the project as a whole to succeed. Les also shares his wisdom and insight on effective communication within engineering & management teams, as well as the skills and habits one needs to succeed as an engineer.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
If your product works, is it a success? During our conversation with Les we learn that is not necessarily the case as we discuss the various elements of a project that all need to succeed in order for the project as a whole to succeed. Les also shares his wisdom and insight on effective communication within engineering & management teams, as well as the skills and habits one needs to succeed as an engineer.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
The Being An Engineer Podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people, resources and opportunities. Enjoy the show.
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to the Being An Engineer Podcast. Our guest today is Les Voss, who is a mechanical engineer currently working at the Vision Care Division of Johnson and Johnson. Les has spent his career developing manufacturing and automation machinery. And as you read through his background and experience, you start to get the sense that he is one of those engineers who really understands engineering's first principles a d how to use them in practice. o I'm super excited to talk wi h you today. Les, welcome to t e sho
Les Voss:Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur:All right. So first, first question here. What was it about engineering that in your, in your formative years spoke to you and convinced you that this is the profession for you?
Les Voss:As a youngster, I like to build things do things, very curious about how things worked? I think you've heard this from a lot of engineers about taking things apart and trying to put them back together.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. With the average adult.
Les Voss:I was also an artist and a writer. So
Aaron Moncur:Oh, interesting
Les Voss:Very creative. And I thought that I wanted to be an artist for a long time. So I think that's an important part that a lot of people miss is the creativity part of engineering is something that everyone isn't focused on. So as a kid, when your kid is very interested in art and creating things, that's just as much a sign of engineering as taking things apart and putting them together.
Aaron Moncur:That's really interesting. What what kind of art were you into as a kid?
Les Voss:It started out doing cartooning. And I and I had a couple of jobs in high school doing cartoons for local weight, weight, room, weight shop, whatever for their advertisements, and I did some a lot of characters of people. And then down the road, I did more realistic art of dogs in particular for people. Just creative stuff.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Nice. Do you still do any art?
Les Voss:I do. Not as much as I used to my daughter is really into art, and urban that she needs to be an artist. And I keep a little bit here and there trying to say, creativity isn't just about our honey.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. And engineering might pay better.
Les Voss:That's, that's right. It's capitalist society. Right.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Right. Okay. You worked for for Beck, early on in your career designing pan assembly equipment? Beck is, I mean, that's a big company that's been around for a long time. Was there ever a point when when you were like, I don't know, standing on the factory floor and thought to yourself,'Wow, I work at Beck, one of the world's leading manufacturers, I am a legit engineer like this is really happening.'
Les Voss:Yeah, yeah. You know what? I, I passed an income threshold while I was at Beckl. And it really blew my mind while I'm making. I don't remember what that money was at this point. But I've made it I'm making that kind of money. That's really amazing. So I'm finally an engineer. Yeah, it took a while to get there. But yeah, and I still felt like a junior engineer. At that point, I was getting a lot of feedback from people that were tool makers and senior design kinds of engineers, folks that knew a lot more about the details than I had learned at that point, that I didn't even realize the depth of learning that I had left to do. But I was still making some pretty interesting machines at that point.
Aaron Moncur:The term 'junior engineers' and 'senior engineers' have always been interesting to me, because it feels like a lot of companies I've seen, there are kids with the titles of senior engineer, they've been in the field for, I don't know, five years or something. And not to say that there aren't these prodigies out there who after five years legitimately can be considered a senior engineer, but I feel like senior engineer, you need to put in 10-15 years to really earn that title. In your experience, how long does an engineer need to hone his or her craft before you can legitimately say, 'Yeah, I'm a senior level engineer.'
Les Voss:So I'm not I'm not certain that promotion level and capability level are always aligned. So just because you have a title that says you're a senior engineer or a staff or whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're working at a capability well beyond some engineers that are in other companies. In fact, in lots of companies, they don't have all the levels. It's really all about what you can contribute. So when I'm saying senior engineer or junior engineer, there wasn't a junior engineer title. But I worked under engineers that knew a lot more than I did. And I learned a lot from them. So I guess I was more of a protege at that point. And they were more more of the mentors. Now I'm acting more as a mentor. And I have a lot more protegees than I am a protege for if that makes sense.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good segue into this next question I have for you, you have your own unique take on what type of individuals make the best engineers? Can you share a little bit about that that type of personality that you think makes the best engineer?
Les Voss:So the most important attribute of an engineer is intellectual curiosity. Somebody that just wonders, they don't know an answer, and they can't stand it. They've got to be on the internet, finding out why. And if they can't find out on the internet, why they're often in their garage, or somewhere else finding out why people that have really widely varied hobbies, things like automotive is interesting to many, many mechanical engineers, but you'll find them being audio files. And you'll also find them in photography, and farming, and plumbing, and all of these different areas. Because everything is interesting to somebody that has intellectual curiosity. People that know a lot about a lot of things. Those people make good engineers, because most everything's been developed before, we just have to figure out how to get it to work in our current application. So if you've got a widely varied touch across many different things, you'll see ways to do things that other people won't.
Aaron Moncur:Do you think that that intellectual curiosity is just an innate talent that one has or doesn't have? Or is it something that that can be developed?
Les Voss:I think it's a habit that you can develop, I think you can start out maybe, maybe maybe some folks start out with that naturally, they're just curious. But I think, for example, one of the things that I like to do is I get the ASME, often emails, and I go, and I link on their stories, and then I go down the rabbit hole, I don't just read what they're sending. I follow on and I look into well, okay, 3D printing. That's interesting. But what about the different materials and the different methods? And what are the tolerances? And how close can we get with what methods? And who does these methods? And how can I use those in my solutions? And will it save us money? All those kinds of questions, go down the rabbit hole and just dig in and make that a habit. Do it once a day or three times a week, find a half an hour and understand something you didn't know.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I like your comment about do it once a day for 30 minutes, or whatever it is, I've recently been reading about Kaizen and how it's this this methodology for small, incremental, but continued improvement. And so trying to develop a new habit, whether it's developing that intellectual curiosity or playing the guitar, you don't need to jump in and spend hours every day. In fact, that might be more likely to to dissuade you from continuing that that approach. You can start really small, just do something in case and they talk about almost ridiculously small, right, like laughably small, do do one little things, spend one minute being curious about something. But do that continuously each day. And over time you start developing these habits, and it makes a big difference over time.
Les Voss:Right? I think you find people that are good at trivial pursuit, and other things like that to probably be good engineers.
Aaron Moncur:Interesting. Well, you also have some strong feelings about continuing education. For engineers in particular, what what problems have you seen, when engineers stop learning? And what suggestions can you share about how engineers by continue their education throughout their careers?
Les Voss:There's almost two pieces to that. The first piece is, when I get young engineers out of school, most of them think they've checked the box, and now they're going to start doing their career. But the reality is, that school was just the first bit of their engineering training. And all of those classes, each one of them is a tool in their toolbox. And you can't pass the class and say done, forget about it, it actually becomes part of what you are. So later on, when you're trying to understand the Venturi effect and how it works and whether or not it matters. You can pull out the thermo book and you can flip over to it and say yeah, here it is. This is that tool or when you want it To know how compressed compressing a guest can make a supercooled liquid, you know that fluid dynamics will get you there. So you pull out that tool. So, I always tell the very first thing I tell all of the engineers is do not put your books away, find ways in every day to, to pull out a book or pull off something off the net, and write down the equation of why it works. Because if you don't do it, you're gonna forget it. And in five years, it's going to be awfully hard to back up and start getting those tools again. So that that's the first bit. And then the second bit is, when you come out of school, you don't know what you need to know to do an engineer's job. They haven't taught you how to, for example, if you're a software engineer, you haven't learned about PLCs. In most colleges, almost all of our industrial equipment runs on PLC code. So who's going to teach them that. And all of our mechanical engineers need to be able to communicate through CAD. Some of them have had one or two classes, but none of them know geometric, dimensioning and tolerancing. And we live in a worldwide market. Our stuff goes overseas all the time. So if we're not using GD&T, we don't know what parts we're getting. So there's this whole list of technical things that, yeah, I got to learn those once I get out. So how do you how do you get started on that? Right?
Aaron Moncur:Well, that's a great point, right? Because what you learn in school, as you said, is not necessarily what you're going to use, at least not all of it, or not the same elements of it in, in industry, what what can you share about the reality of day to day life as an engineer that either you didn't expect or or maybe just that, that those considering a career in engineering should be aware of?
Les Voss:All right, so that decision that we talked about, where folks will leave the tools in the toolbox, and they'll go off and decide not that they'd gotten their engineering degree, and now they're going to become managers. So managers and engineers, managers that have engineering degrees don't often do management, but they still need to know what they learned. So some of the good ones will keep pulling out their tools, but others won't. But what you'll find is those folks now need to learn a really intense set of skills on how to manage people. And I'm not talking about managing the people underneath you. I'm talking about managing your peers and managing your management, managing expectations, understanding things like a business plan, and why it's important understand that this is going to pay us back. Even if the whiz bang system works. If it doesn't pay us back, we're, we're not going to build it right. That's my biggest failure was one of those things. So. So I think you have to remember that it's not just technical, the other set of skills is this whole emotional intelligence or this ability to manage and deal with other people communicate, talk, stand in front of people and give a speech. All these real soft skills that engineers usually aren't very comfortable with out of school?
Aaron Moncur:And where do you go to learn those soft skills? I mean, part of it probably is from mentors, right? Like yourself, you had your mentors, now you act as a mentor. Outside of mentors, are there other tools or strategies that you found to be useful and developing those soft skills?
Les Voss:I like books, because, and I listened to a lot of audible books on my phone or whatever. I'm constantly listening to different ways and things that people think. Things like presence, executive presence. What is that? I'm curious, I don't understand or how does how does emotional? What does emotional intelligence even mean? And how do you deal with other people? And why? Why is, why is diversity really important? a mental diversity is incredibly important. If you don't get people with very different ideas in the room, you're never going to get very different new ideas, you're only going to get much you've always gotten. So to learn about these things, the only way I've found his books. So I read a lot of books about how things get done.
Aaron Moncur:I echo that I love to read books. And more recently, I've been doing more listening to books than actually reading the books. Here's my thing with listening books, and maybe you have a solution for this. What I love about reading the book is I can highlight it and then it's easy, especially in digital form to go back and find those highlighted sections and I can read through them again, I'll often open a book that I had read, a year ago or two years ago and just read through the highlights that I had done. But it takes a long time, right for me anyway to read a book versus listening. It takes a lot less time so you can get through a lot more content, but I have not found any good way to, quote unquote highlight sections in the book. Is that's something that you've ever experienced?
Les Voss:Well, I've been through the thought process, I haven't solved it. My my solution is because it's so fast to read the books and audio, I've listened to them over and over again. I have a good memory. So things stick in my head if I listened to them more than once or twice. So I take those books, and they're all in my phone, and I'm constantly dialing up another one. Oh, that habits book was really great, right. But there's different books that will guide me on something I feel like I'm missing right now.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's a good approach. That makes sense. Okay, speaking to the the technical aspect of things, what are a few technical areas or skill sets that you feel younger engineers in particular, but maybe even more seasoned engineers, sometimes lack that that should be strengthened to realize, one's full potential as an engineer?
Les Voss:Right now, in engineering, there's this whole digital movement happening where finite element analysis is really moving to the next level. 510K builds and things for the FDA are being done through digital means they're not always done through physical testing. So with sufficiently skilled people running finite element analysis, you can achieve experimentation that you can actually turn in and say this is actually done. So you still have to validate your model, some parts of the model will need to be proven that they work to show that that works. But if you can run finite element analysis, ANSYS is one, there's console, there's a number of good ones. If you can do that, what it requires is it requires a really solid understanding of those tools from your toolbox. When you were in college, in fact, that's why when I get a young person, as an engineer, I immediately start them on finite element analysis, because they still remember all of the equations and all of the methods behind the madness that is FEA, right? It's not just a model.
Aaron Moncur:Right
Les Voss:What's happening, and they can do that. So that that's one thing, get them into FEA. The next thing is CAD. CAD is not a cat computer assisted design, SolidWorks inventor, probably, those things used to be a specific tool that would carry you through your career. And you would design things on that. And that would make you a great engineer. Now their communication tool. If you can't run CAD, you can't communicate your ideas quickly. How are you going to show them what you mean? Are you going to sketch it on the board, maybe you can, if you're a great sketch artist, but you might find that if you can use CAD, you can show things quickly and better. People will be impressed with what you can show them as well. Statistics, this is another area that's right now, right? This is something that when I took college, I hated statistics, I still don't like it, I still find it to be magical. And I really, but I have friends that are experts in statistics and the things that they can do with statistics. They're amazing. I mean, recently in a job, I was able to change the variation that I was seeing in a load cell input. Remarkably, I was able to get 400% improvement by over sampling and reuse using the some of the means or I don't even remember the statistics that did it. But I can network with people that can tell me how to use that. And by doing it, we were able to solidify it without having to increase the capability of the load cells. So don't run away from statistics. I think statistics is probably a tool that's here to stay.
Aaron Moncur:Do you use SolidWorks? Is that your your CAD program?
Les Voss:That's my preference. I've used a lot of CAD softwares, but that's the one I use now.
Aaron Moncur:In terms of FEA, you mentioned getting young engineers involved with that, I'm assuming that you yourself, do some FEA, do you do you like using the SolidWorks simulation package? Or do you just use ANSYS?
Les Voss:I use ANSYS. Because when I use SolidWorks, I'm always frustrated that I can't manage the, the I can't manage the details as closely as I want. And the results are not scaled. So things look wrong. This is a key point when when you're done with a project, it often matters as much how well it looks as it does how well it functions. So if I do work in FEA, and I can show that it deforms a little bit. Then people get it, but when I show them a little bit of information in SolidWorks, it looks like a lot of different issues. They don't get it. So I'm dealing with people that don't use FEA, and I have to use that tool to show them. So how it looks and what it conveys is as important as how accurate it is.
Aaron Moncur:Got it. That makes sense. Okay. Something that you mentioned in your LinkedIn description is that all equipment and systems follow the same physics and creation of any system is possible through application of these common laws. Can you expound on that just a little bit more?
Les Voss:okay. So, when I worked at, I worked initially at Millikin, making carpets, broadloom carpets. Thermo was heavily utilized there, we did something called 'cloud point control.' By using a thermocouple, you could control where the cloud was in a steamer, so that you could manage your carpet without causing the dyes to become drab. So I figured out how back then I was pulling out my tools. And I figured out well, gosh, we can we can use, we can use thermo to figure out where to put this. Right. So then, when I moved to Beck, I thought, well, gosh, this is gonna be totally different. No, it's the same exact thing. They're all the same concepts that you then when I was interviewed from big to come to J&J, the question that the key question that I was asked, 'Well, what makes you think you can design contact lens equipment?' And my response was, well, 'They're all just machines. If you know what you want them to do, they follow the same rules.' So one of the rules is exact constraint design. If you can manage to know where everything is, by design, then there isn't any adjustment, it works well all the time. Once it works, it can't be changed to not work, there isn't any adjustment. So things like exact constraint design or application of the tools like thermo that you got out of college, those things apply. It doesn't matter whether it's making whipped cream, carpet pens, or insertion systems, it doesn't matter.
Aaron Moncur:It's all the same, right? physics doesn't change based on the project.
Les Voss:It's your ability and your flexibility on how you can apply the things that you see and use.
Aaron Moncur:Well said. All right, well, I'm gonna take just a really short break here and share with our listeners that testfixturedesign.com is where you can learn more about my company pipeline design and engineering, and how we help men medical device engineering teams who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment, to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. We're speaking with Les Voss today, who is a principal engineer at Johnson and Johnson, Vision Care less, you spent pretty much your entire career developing new machines and equipment, if you had to share a checklist with maybe a young engineering team that that listed the top three things to pay attention to when doing machine design work, what would be on that list?
Les Voss:Well, I guess I just let the cat out of the bag, the number one most important thing is exact constraint design. So this is a hard one for people to get. But what it means is everything is specified exactly where it needs to be, but not over specified. So for example, if I want to locate two plates together, I'll use one pin and one slot with a pin in it. So that one of them gives me x y location, and the other one gives me theta about that x y. So if you extrapolate that into everything you design, what happens is, everything by design is where your tolerances say it will be. And if you need an adjustment point, you design that into. And everyone knows, this is my adjustment point. And what happens with that kind of equipment is it always works. Once it works, it can't not work. It has to always work. If it fails to work, then something's broken, or somebody's moved one of your constraints. So I usually spend the first hour drawing sketches and showing people what exact constraint design is. There's a book on the books a little difficult to read, but it isn't it does convey the concept.
Aaron Moncur:Do you recall the name of the book?
Les Voss:Exact Constraint Design.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, just like it sounds, all right. I actually have not heard that at that exact term before but that sounds like a really interesting. Well, maybe the read is not so interesting, but the concept
Les Voss:It's a small book, sounds very difficult to read, but
Aaron Moncur:That's encouraging a small book. Okay. I can get through a small difficult yet.
Les Voss:Really important. I don't think it gets often read. It doesn't look very earmarked when I get it back. Yeah, so I guess that's the first thing
Aaron Moncur:Okay.
Les Voss:The second thing is, don't try to do it all yourself, because you're not going to know everything about it. So I spend as much time before I start designing, as I trying to understand it, as I do afterwards, as after I have a concept developing, it is actually short. But what takes the time is finding the people that really understand what what's going on, talking to them at length, finding out what they think the watch outs are, how they would do it, getting some ideas, and then I follow that, like I said, the rabbit hole down of entertainment, make notes of things I need to know more about. Because system I recently developed needed, multi axis load. So feedback, I've never done anything like that before. But turns out that people like the surgical robots, and all of that those guys do a lot of that. So by going in there and reading all about surgical robots, I was able to develop an instrument that used those techniques, I didn't have to figure out all of that, it's already there.
Aaron Moncur:And when you say it's already there, are you referring to like academic papers that you found in some journal? Or are you interviewing people that have direct experience with those applications or something else altogether?
Les Voss:Well, if it's a local thing, and there are people to interview, that's where I always start, I find that the technicians that run the equipment, like if you're working on equipment that's there and you want to improve it, talk to the technicians, they will almost always feed you every answer you need. Because you're making their life better. So all you need to do is once you get their confidence that you're actually going to do what you say, those folks will feed you. So if it's on equipment, that's their go to the people that know it, the people that fix it. And then if it's not that, if it's something totally outside your zone, like this last thing I mentioned, the load cell system, I started doing internet searches, and I found out, oh, the da Vinci robot, wow, that has this kind of thing in it. What do I how can I learn about that? There's a lot of articles about how that works. And then I found out who makes the parts for them. And I call them up when I tell them what I'm doing and where I work and tell them, ask them if they can help me. And almost always they're happy to sell me something. So
Aaron Moncur:That's a great approach. Okay, anything else there? If if you're through that's fine. don't necessarily need three. But if you had anything else in mind, I don't want to cut you off.
Les Voss:I think those are probably two key points. Get those started, you'd be in good shape.
Aaron Moncur:Excellent. You started to talk about this briefly earlier. Can you share a major success and a major failure that you had or the teams that you've been a part of have had over the years and what you and all of us can learn from those experiences?
Les Voss:Okay, so I mentioned Venturi, Venturi cooling, there's a process that we had used where we were using a I think it was a vacuum pipe device, where it was using the Venturi effect and ideal gas law to create cooling. So you'd use compressed air and it converts it to cold air. It's pretty inefficient, but it works well if you just need spot cooling. And we were doing that on our product. Well, then a new product came and we needed very cold air. And we were literally buying an entire compressor, a plank compressor, huge, huge, incredibly large air expensive. We had to build new roads into our plant in Ireland and big compressors in order to use the Venturi effect in the array size that we were running on our new product lines. And it was the only way because we were just scaling up no one had stopped to think well, what are we doing? Well, when that started happening, there was a lot of disgruntled, well, why are we doing it that way? And so then the research starts and you start thinking about it and then you ask well why are we using the Venturi cooling effect? That's not how we make cold gas. When you figure out what do you is that look we make liquid nitrogen and it's all done through compression so why don't we just do that in the end result was on every line that ran this new product and on many many lines now on I don't know many lines. We no longer have high air compressor usage, high electric usage. We have these very cleverly designed vacuum and reflective heat. They don't transfer heat tubing so we were able to remotely locate these things we call them the Mr. Freeze and the Mr. Freeze 2. Mr. Freeze 2 is incredibly cold it can literally get down to liquid co2 levels. So
Aaron Moncur:Wow
Les Voss:Very fun project resulted in big wins for the company. So if you're gonna ask about that, though, the next question is what's the big failure? So
Aaron Moncur:Right
Les Voss:As I'm thinking across my career, and I'm trying to understand what is the failure? The failure isn't always a project that failed. So we did a project a few years ago, and it was maybe the most difficult project I've ever done. And it was using interferometry, in a high vibration environment. And I don't really want to go interferometry is something that's a niche optics kind of thing. And it's how you can measure lenses to make sure that they are what you think they are. They don't, they usually requires two points of measurement. And if you use two points, you have to have a time variable, therefore, it becomes vibration sensitive. Anyway, that interferometry, people at the University of Arizona told us, we couldn't do it, it wasn't possible. So we did it. And it worked the first time, very first time. So it felt like we had this huge victory. Well, well, the engineers had been working away, and we'd been nailing down all these wins, management had decided that what we were doing with this system was called going to be called parametric release, we were going to be able to release product online after manufacturing, because straight without going through quality control, because we were going to measure online, and we could measure online. But there was a lot happening in between that measurement and the final product out the door. So it turned out that it couldn't pay value. If you were measuring the quality in the middle of the line, and then wanted to release it at the end, there was too many things that you would have to validate and prove didn't change. So the value the business model the plan, it wouldn't support the cost of the unit. So this fantastic system, you get maybe in your career, you get one or two things the first time you turn them on, they work. So this one the first time we turned it on, it worked the hardest thing ever. And then management said sorry, created up because the business case would be support
Aaron Moncur:Oh no, that must have been so painful
Les Voss:It's horribly painful. And it's not only painful, but it it's career damaging, because you do a year or two of work on something that's really supposed to provide results for the business. And in the end, it doesn't provide results. And it doesn't matter whether it failed for technical reasons or business reasons. So failure doesn't always happen because you didn't do the technical things, right. Sometimes it's because you weren't communicating with management, or management didn't understand what you were telling them.
Aaron Moncur:So that's an interesting point. Is the failure just on the side of management? Or do we say that the failure is on the side of engineering as well for not understanding the business case? Because the business case isn't really the responsibility of the the engineering team?
Les Voss:You're right, it isn't. But I heard them, as we were going along. I heard them saying parametric release. And every time I heard that it was like nails on a chalkboard. I didn't ever think it was going to be possible to do that. But I never went and showed them why it wasn't possible. They might my manager at the time. He's very, very bright. He understands engineering. He has a master's degree in engineering himself. He gets it. So he's the one that finally sat down and did the math, the money math to figure out what's the business case here. And despite everyone wanting to use this whiz bang, super cool new system that did but never been done before. Just gonna cost you money, and it's not going to pay you back. It's a failure.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah.
Les Voss:So I think it was my failure as much as it was management's failure. I should admit
Aaron Moncur:that it's a horrible experience. But it's a terrific experience at the same time. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that with everyone.
Les Voss:It happened.
Aaron Moncur:Well, let's see. Tell me about this, this FPX system that you use or Flawless Project Execution. That was another term that I was not familiar with, can you give us just a brief summary of what that is? Sure. J&J has actually developed that internally, that's why you've not heard of it. There are a lot of project management kinds of things out there. And J&J borrowed some of those from it. But what Flawless Trust Project Management Execution really means is you're communicating all the time. If you have to boil it all down. What it means is, I'm meeting with my team regularly the technical team, and I'm meeting with my stakeholders. And I've got definitions of what those stakeholders are accountable for. And I know what I need to communicate to them. And I've got definitions of who's my project sponsor. So if I run into trouble, this is usually somebody at a more executive level that can manage to move things and communicate things that may be an engineer's into going to be as good at communicating. So I can always go to my project sponsor. So there's, there's just a designed in method of how to interact with the key people on a key project. And it just makes everything go so much smoother, because everyone's engaged. They all align at the beginning on what the objectives are. And you have a kickoff meeting, where everyone says, 'This is what done looks like, this is what's included, this is what's not included, we're not going to do these things. And this is what the final state looks like,' we'll know you're successful when we achieve these objectives. And all of that, even if it takes eight or 10 hours of discussion is agreed on in a room with the stakeholders and the project leaders before it starts. So when you get to the end, you're done. You've won, you've achieved what you set out to achieve. It really all comes down to communication. It's it's astounding that I hear that same comment echoed over and over by so many different engineers that I've talked with, what what are some of the most important skills to develop in engineering. And communication is just probably the top one that I've heard over and over. We had a project recently, it was it was probably, it was probably our biggest fail ever as a company. And it came down to not having a robust, thorough set of project requirements at the beginning, and then not communicating well, both internally and with our customer as the project went on. And it was it was just a colossal disaster in the end. And it just came down to poor communication, I think something actually before I ask the next question, can you can you share without disclosing any confidential aspects of the system that J&J has designed, can you share any of the granular tools in this this Flawless Project Execution System that facilitates that, that conversation that communication between the team
Les Voss:There, there are standard. There's the standard PowerPoint slash, Excel sheet that lists out the different tools that need to be populated. And it's very concise on how you need to define your goals and objectives. It's not it doesn't allow you to be wishy washy, you have to very specifically say this is what will be accomplished. And when, and how, and at what cost. And this is what is not included, and and then deleting delineating all of those out, and also resources, right? How many times do you get into a project knowing that you can succeed if you have the right people, but you can't get the right people? So at the beginning, the stakeholders must include the managers that are that have those people reporting to them, those folks actually become bound by their yearly goals and objectives on your FPX team. So if they fail to contribute to your team properly, you're going to be able to have feedback on their goal, yearly goals and objectives. It's all tied together. It's very intermingle. There's no nobody can skate. It's got to happen. And then there's weekly meetings every week meeting happens on Tuesday. On Thursday, the notes have to be out the following Tuesday, you're going through the list and you're checking what does everybody done? Everybody lists what they're going to do. It's all detailed out. It's very, very intensive in the paperwork at the beginning. But the result is the work at the end is much less.
Aaron Moncur:It's really interesting listening to, listening to you talk about this, because these things they sound pretty basic, right? I mean, it's taking notes, it's making a list. It's clearly defining things. At the same time. It's so easy to not do those things. We just human nature.
Les Voss:That's the easy part. Right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, right.
Les Voss:But it's not the easy part. It really, but it's not. Getting everybody aligned and getting them together. That's, that's hard.
Aaron Moncur:It's not the fun part, which makes it not easy.
Les Voss:Maybe that's a fair point. We're rushing to get to the fun part. We all like the creative or maybe we all
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something else I struggle with managing projects is understanding how far through a project we actually are. It's easy to to look at a budget and say, okay, we've used 50% of this budget, just looking at the hours and expenses associated with the project to date. For me anyway, it's much more difficult to say, okay, we've used 50% of the budget, are we actually 50% done with the project. And the only way that I've been able to, with some degree of accuracy measure that is to list out all the tasks that are remaining that I think we still need to do, assign, an hour amount, a dollar amount to all of those tasks, and then add it all up and compare it with how much of the budget we've actually used? And if they match, great, and if they don't, okay, we know, we need to make some, some changes, but that that process can take a while. And we don't always know what tasks are remaining to do still right, especially in an R&D environment, like you're guessing on what you think you might still need to do. What what have been your experiences with with managing that process and understanding what percent complete are we actually with this this project?
Les Voss:So when we do Flawless Project Execution, FPX, it works much, much better. If it's not an r&d project, you can, and it's not an R&D project, when you're, when you're doing something like we're moving this product that's running well here, over to this new equipment that's going to run there, we know all of the things that are necessary to do it. So when we do that, we can lay out milestones, if by this date, we've achieved this much, then we know that it's right, we can hit the big picture items, the top peaks, we get those, then we can fill in the details, we know that we're going to make the timeline, an R&D project, FPX seems to fall a little short. And and that's one of the things the feedback to the FPX team is, how do we do better on an R&D project? Because often you don't know what you don't know, until you get there. Yeah, it can cause a great delay. And how do you cope trying that kind of a job? Right?
Aaron Moncur:Exactly.
Les Voss:So I faced that in my like, my yearly deliverables? How do I, how do I establish where I'm gonna be when it's a completely new thing that no one's ever done before? Right. So I think there's not a good answer for that right now. I don't know.
Aaron Moncur:Well, that, that makes me feel a little bit better, at least that here you are with all your decades of experience, and you don't have a great answer for it either. All right. Well, you've you've held leadership and managerial roles throughout your career. Let's go back to that that checklist that we talked about earlier for engineering teams, and pretend this time, it's for a group of budding project managers or leaders. What what goes on that checklist this time?
Les Voss:So now they're project managers. They don't want to be technical engineers, they want to be project managers.
Aaron Moncur:Right.
Les Voss:I'm mentoring an engineer now, who is that kind of an engineer. And the funny thing that she too, wants to leave behind her tools. But I'm pushing her because a project manager needs to understand what happens and what needs to happen. And those are the tools that you got in college, whether or not you know they're valuable, they're incredibly valuable. So intend to pull them out. So then the next thing is, become the expert. So in this particular job, it's a pleading it's a new type of diamond like carbon isn't really new, but it's a new type for us. Diamond like carbon is an awesome coating process that makes things very slick, and corrosion resistant. It's not very expensive. It's really good for injection molding, different wear things. Anyway, no one knows how to do it and accompany this, this young lady is frustrated because nobody knows how to do it. Well, guess what? She's going to be the expert. Take, take that leadership role and decide with your skills getting through engineering school, you really don't think that you're capable of understanding how to do plating. Forget about it, you, you know, you can do that. It's not that much research. There's a few weeks at most, maybe not even that maybe it's a week, spend the time and become the expert, you'll be the expert for the rest of your career. Isn't it worth it? So, so the project managers and leaders that I respect most those folks take the time to actually understand the projects and the technical background of the things that they're leading, so that they can call bs on somebody that isn't doing their work. You can't tell if a guy's not doing his work if you're not aware of what needs to be done. So dig in.
Aaron Moncur:So you're saying, don't just manage budget and schedule understand the technical fundamentals of what it is you're doing so that you can not that you're trying to catch people, but you understand when something's going off the rails from a technical technical standpoint?
Les Voss:We had a failure because the print was bad. The print wasn't properly specified, that was one of the failures. So is it the project managers fault that the print was bad? No. But when the print is bad, and the project manager then fails, who's accountable the project manager. So it was worth her time to sit and learn a little bit about GD&T so that she could at least make sure that the basic datum structure was there, and that she understood what it meant. And maybe she'll take the class now, I don't think there's useless knowledge. I really don't I think that if you can stand it, learn what you need to learn to be an expert where you can.
Aaron Moncur:From that standpoint, it almost sounds like you're describing the project manager is is the engineering analog to a radiologist, right, someone that knows all the different parts of the body and how they work together.
Les Voss:Right? Right. They need to they don't need to know all the details, she's not going to need to draw the drawing, she's not going to need to do SolidWorks. Probably not having never will. Yeah, it might help her she could at least see the prints.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, last last question for you. What are one or two of the biggest challenges that you face at work?
Les Voss:I am much, much better at technical parts of work and achieving whatever. So I'm a, I'm a solution guy. I'm not a question guy. If a guy has a question, a good question guy can ask you something that really will change the way the world works. If they they will say things that only that could be this way? That's a great question guy, because they might see something that is just intrinsically better. I'm a solution guy. When somebody says that to me, I'm really good at finding an answer. So I can solve that problem. I need a good question guy to work with me as a solution guy. Ideally, that question guys, my manager, because manager can ask me those things, then I can go ahead and succeed with management as well. What I'm finding is, the more difficult of the questions I can answer, the more difficult it is to find somebody to answer ask a reasonable question. Right. So, for example, the online measurement system, most difficult thing I've ever done, when we got done, it wasn't needed. The next project I did was a similar project never been done. I did it. But when I was done, it wasn't used. So the point is, is despite having these FPX meetings where people agree that when you're done with this, this is going to be value added. And this is going to change the business. You can't be successful. If the projects you do really don't change the business. So finding the right people to lean on to guide you to the right projects. That's maybe the most difficult part of my job.
Aaron Moncur:Interesting. So do you, I don't know how it works at J&J, but do you, are you given different options so you could work on project A, B, and C, and it's up to you to decide which one you want to work on?
Les Voss:Sometimes they're specifically assigned. Those, those are good, because now you're not on the hook when it doesn't have a win, right. But often, you're engaged with the group's success, the group, for example, on the online measurement system, the group was engaged in trying to understand real time quality issues as they heard on the line. So to solve for that finding best best methods to measure things online, was part of a brainstorm meeting that I was in without the manager gets behind that idea. And so it's as much my idea as it is his idea, a lot of the things that I make, start out as a small idea, and they grow into a very big or complicated solution. So I become very engaged and responsible for the business success, not just the project success.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Which is all in a way it's almost too bad, right? Because you have to temper your your passion for creating something great with the understanding that I don't want to be associated with a failed project because that could, might hurt my career. And it seems like that could almost the I don't know, stifle creativity or or future breakthroughs and technology and products for the company.
Les Voss:Yeah, it's, it slows us down, right? Because you have engineers now focusing in an area that they're not excellent. Want to focus in the areas, that was a key point I learned a few years ago, don't try to fill in your gaps. Everyone has gaps fit, rather take that your highlights, amplify those become phenomenal, the best at your highlights, let the gaps be filled by your peers and move on as long as you can get along with those gaps get along.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, if I'm really strong, technically, but don't have great, soft skills, call it, I could spend a lot of time trying to improve my sock skills. But that's time I can't spend trying to make my technical skills even better. So at the end of the day, I end up being still, pretty good technically, but just maybe I've gone from really poor to mediocre, soft skills. And overall, I'm still just pretty good. Where if I had focused all that time on improving my technical skills, I could be a rock star superstar, technically, and forget about the soft skills, let someone else handle that.
Les Voss:That's exactly it. Now just find somebody that can fill those gaps. That's that's the hard dip. Right?
Aaron Moncur:Right.
Les Voss:I'm the manager or the person, the partner that will help you with those gaps.
Aaron Moncur:The complimentary skill sets. I hear you. Yeah. All right. Well, Les, thank you so much for your time today. You've just shared a wealth of knowledge. And I can I can feel all the experience that you've had and all that hard earned knowledge. So thank you so much for that. If people want to get ahold of you, what what's the best way for them to do that?
Les Voss:I have a LinkedIn page. I think that's probably the best way to contact me through email on LinkedIn. I'd like to give up my email, but I think I'll hold that and you can reach
Aaron Moncur:Fair enoough, fair enough.
Les Voss:I want to hear from folks because I mentor a lot of people. I work with the the youth leadership development program and different ways to try to help folks get into the science and technology areas. And I do like to mentor I think we need more engineers. Engineers make the world a better place.
Aaron Moncur:Well, there you go. Dear listeners, you want to you want a mentor, this is the guy. All right. Well, Les, thank you again, so much for spending some time for for taking the time out of your busy day.
Les Voss:Okay, thank you. It's good meeting with you.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, Founder of Pipeline Design & Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show. To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at testfixturedesign.com. Thanks for listening.