The Best Process Won’t Fix Broken Technology

We hear it all the time – it’s all in the process. To a degree there is truth to that.  Efficient and well thought out processes enable high throughput rates, innovation, and revenue growth.  However, there has to be a solid technical foundation that is being produced.  If the technical solution is flawed, efficient processing will only produce something that doesn’t work at a faster rate.  In the government, technical readiness levels or TRL’s are being explored to measure the technical maturity of a product prior to full scale production.  Manufacturing readiness levels or MRL’s attempt something similar by measuring process maturity.  Together TRL’s and MRL’s work to foster communication between the design and operation teams with tools and objective measures that signal misalignments.  The goal is not to rush a product from concept to production before it has had the due diligence invested in it to perform as required.  Rushing a product to market usually spells costly retrofits, high change curves and at worst field failures.  The TRL and MRL concepts apply sound logic to this process but are only as good as the discipline and patience required to execute them.  Rushing through them only produces the same problems as not having implemented them in the first place.