Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 2

As the supervising engineer responsible for the final testing you have a responsibility to deliver a fully tested product to the latter stages of the project and eventually, the customer. My decision, bearing this responsibility, after noticing the mistake if missing a product test would be to immediately consult with the production manager. The significance in this decision is communication and involvement of more people in the process. Another resulting factor could be the limitation to the accountability of the engineer in question, as all future decisions would not be their sole responsibility.

What is the importance of the test? Several things should be taken into consideration here. The significance of the test should be analysed, the impact to the functionality, safety and life span of the product must be known. It may be possible that the specific test would have no major impact on the final product. This assumption however cannot be made due to the nature of the question.

If no action was taken, a possible effect of this total test mitigation could be the impaired safety and functionality of the product. This could lead to a total recall of all the units. The Dell battery recall of 2006 displays a similar, legitimate comparison to the consequences of faulty units. The laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, overheated to a degree where they were a fire risk and subsequently they issued a request for all units to be returned. This totaled 4.1 million units costing both companies severely in financial and reputability costs. This appears have occured due to a lack of communication between Dell and Sony following the outsourcing of the product. The scale of this case questions if all necessary tests were performed on the equipment before its release. I use this scenario to establish a likely outcome for Intel releasing an un-tested product into the marketplace.

To complete the tests properly the production manager would have to re-coordinate the production to re-enter phase 6 again. This would keep the problem as limited as possible with less significant long term results. As the step falls within the critical path however, the event will cause an inevitable delay to the project. A possible solution to this would be to take the batch of products out of the current process and place them in another one. The efficiency of creating a seperate process to test product faults would have to be analysed. A drastic but perhaps necessary option could be to destroy the batch. All viable solutions involve illiminating the possibility of releasing un-tested products to the market place.

Sooner or later we all have to choose between what is easy and what is right.