Functionalization

When I was teaching at San Jose State University, I tried to get the functional engineering departments to have students from different disciplines work together on a project that involved the integration of the disciplines. The heads of those functional departments resisted strongly as they wanted the students to focus on excellence in their function.

Later in my career I was asked by General Electric to be the project lead for its role in leading the large-scale prototype breeder national project. General Electric’s role was the design of the reactor system, and many other major companies and national labs had the responsibility of working on the plant’s auxiliary systems necessary to convert the reactor power to electricity.

When I was asked to lead the project for GE the company was many months behind on the schedule and was having major difficulty in getting agreement on the reactor design between the major functional departments involved. It was very difficult for the functional departments to compromise their portion of the design to achieve the best integrated design, which resulted in undertaking many exploratory projects to try and make decisions on the integrated design.

I established a core team of experts from each functional discipline to facilitate the integration of the design. My core team was successful in resolving the issues between the integration of the various design concepts and processes and after about 9 months GE was back on schedule and the company was getting positive feedback from project participants on their contribution to the project.

A major challenge in achieving high-performance on complex projects is to recognize our cultural history of focusing on expertise in separate functions. Developing process-based partnership organizations, on projects and in operations, is a means of overcoming the detrimental effects of this cultural history.

Back to Projects