Electronic Components

Every place I've worked such changes and features had been agreed upon prior to the start of the project. Otherwise you are faced with the impossible task of trying to develop something that can cover every possible situation someone might dream up.

If someone from other groups changes these without consulting anyone as to IF its even possible, Someones higher ups need to be going to someone elses higher ups or even someone higher up the ladder.

This is setting up the company to appear to be one that can't deliver on its promises.

When I got started in electronics, I worked in companies that were so small that most coordination was done using informal conversations.

But then I switched to a larger group. I wasn't doing electronics any more, but I learned a lot about how a larger organization can stay coordinated. We used a nested team structure with coordination meetings that emphasized consensus-based decision making. How well it worked depended on how well all the participants knew what their responsibilities were and stood up for their group in the meetings.

I have worked in traditional corporate settings where I didn't have a clue how coordination and decision-making took place at the higher levels. But in this group, all staff were expected to be familiar with these mechanisms, and were trained on them. The nested group structure was key. Each group had to have an I/C (In-Charge) and that person was responsible for representing his or her group at the (usually daily) coordination meetings. And each coordination group, in turn, had one I/C who was responsible for taking any unresolvable issues up to the next level and try to get them resolved with peers representing the other larger production groups in the organization. It was an intense communication process, and could break down if someone, at any level, failed to communicate something important to the I/C or at a meeting.

So when coordination fails and bad things happen, it could be due to:

1. Lack of, or breakdown of, a workable coordination structure.
2. Lack of staff knowledge about how to use that structure.
3. Communication breakdowns for all sorts of reasons.

To resolve a particular issue, you have to know what caused it, or you'll waste time fixing things that weren't broken.