I do love a boat anchor!  (Heavy valve based electronics in a giant steel box!)  Waiting for the valves to warm up was part of the fun.

Heathkit made a lot of useful hobby equipment, mostly sold in kit form, so the buyer had to assemble it himself.  Designed down to a price for the hobby market compared with much more expensive lab equipment, but usually performed well.

Kits are double edged!  Great if you like building things, very annoying if you only it needed to measure stuff.   The ‘March of Technology’ killed Heathkit because the cost of commercial electronics kept dropping whilst complexity shot up.   My pudgy fingers can handle valve sized components but I struggle with subminiature equivalents.  Resistors so small I need a loupe to see them and if one pings out of the tweezers it will never be found.

Another double edged feature is boat anchors require a skilled operator.  Their controls often have to be adjusted skilfully, which can be fun,  but is time-wasting compared with an automatic modern instrument.   Automatic is great until it fails on an edge case, which an old school manual might resolve with careful twiddling.

All my boat anchors are long gone, sob.   Sad reason:  no room for them in a house full of kids and a wife with a knitting machine!

Boat-anchor designers were remarkably clever at getting lots of functionality out of a small number of simple expensive components.  Now designers have a wide choice of dirt cheap complex components that can do much much more, but the results aren’t necessarily better!

A tiny box kept in a drawer that just measures whatever is plugged is more convenient than a 16x9x6″ 11lb instrument that needs a skilled driver.

If I had room, I’d collect boat-anchors, they are lovely!

Dave

PS Sorry the forum mangled John’s comparison table.  Not his fault.  Apart from screen-shooting tables and posting the image, I’ve failed to find a way of just copying tables or programs in as text.   The forum editor deletes spaces it considers unnecessary.

Well!  Just in the process of making another EM impulsed clock and repurposing a small electromagnet bobbin.  I know it works in a clock but would really like to know its inductance so I ordered one of these.  Not to mention the box of 300 assorted miniature ceramic caps I just bought which are all labelled in very small low contrast letters that I can hardly read – how nice to be able to just measure one to check.

Worth noting that the FRNSI “UK store” has a special offer on at the moment, at a price that’s comparable to Banggood etc. https://www.fnirsi.com/products/lcr-st1

On 26 January 2025 at 10:17 Circlip Said:

Surprised … there is a need (for Joe public) to determine LCR measurements today with the “Use and chuck” society we are now encrusted in.

Shouldn’t be!  Electronics, embedded, computer, maker and ham radio are enormous.

Although traditional metalwork might be fading it’s clear other technical interests are growing.  Not clear to me where it’s going though, hobby engineering is evolving.  Don’t dismiss anything!

Dave

I also experienced the ridiculous side of ISO9001, but an even worse idea that was enforced upon us as software developers/programmers was Function Point Counting.

In essence, a way to evaluate what a piece of code was worth, and could therefore be charged for. All very good, but amongst the calculations was a variable multiplier. If the “worth” of your code didn’t fall within the expected range, you could just alter the multiplier value until you got the anticipated (acceptable to management) result!

We didn’t use the process for very long. 🙂

Rob

There’s nothing wrong with QA if applied sensibly. Any reputable organisation will have procedures for calibrating measuring equipment, checking calcs, making sure you use the correct material etc. The problem comes when you employ QA ‘engineers’. Where I worked one of the bonus targets was to produce more procedures, at one time there were several different ones for performing and approving calculations. In vain did I argue that we should only have one, and that if you didn’t need a procedure to meet the rquirements of ISO 9001 you shouldn’t have one, because if you haven’t got one you can’t fail the audit.

I did once comment to a QA man that if I designed a lead lifejacket all he would be bothered about was whether we’d used the correct grade of lead. When the chap who cuts the grass at the local sports field had ‘ISO 9001 approved’ emblazoned on his van I knew that common sense had left the room

On 26 January 2025 at 08:32 SillyOldDuffer Said:

PS Sorry the forum mangled John’s comparison table.  Not his fault.  Apart from screen-shooting tables and posting the image, I’ve failed to find a way of just copying tables or programs in as text.   The forum editor deletes spaces it considers unnecessary.

One possibility, which is also a bit of a faff: save the document as a pdf, and use an on-line pdf-jpg converter.
Still doesn’t solve the problem where someone might want to cut and paste text from the table/spreadsheet though.

Bill

The arrival of ISO9001, Lean Six Sigma, TQP and similar in the workplace is a red alert.

Works like this.  The board meet and the Accountant presents the financials.  They are dreadful; the organisation is slowly going bankrupt, root cause before I retired was usually low productivity.

The board can’t go public with this because it will cause shareholders and the banks to withdraw funds asap, thus crashing the company immediately.

They can try to address why productivity is low.  This often boiled down to everyone doing their own thing, winging it,  high waste, and doing the job in time-honoured ways.  Spanish practices, theft of time and material, high staff levels with low skills, and inefficiencies galore.  A Slack Alice paradise, bleeding money from every orifice, but Slack Alice doesn’t understand that.  And no-one explains because the bad financial news will leak and destroy the company.

Therefore the problem was addressed surreptitiously.  One way is to have the team apply ISO9001.  The team are supposed to review their processes, write it all down, and improve them.  Then productivity improves.

What actually happens is no-one outside the board takes the job seriously. Seen as a bureaucratic tick box exercise to be fudged and quickly kicked into the long grass.   And it’s easy to fake ISO9001 because no-one checks!  Today ISO9001 has a poor reputation because it was usually applied incompetently by lazy clowns.  The board hoped their team were responsible adults, and they weren’t.  As the team didn’t fix anything, productivity doesn’t improve and a year or two later the firm goes bust or is bought out.   Mass redundancies follow.

ISO9001 often meant the organisation is in the Last Chance Saloon, but it’s seen by everyone not in the financial know as a waste of time.  The awful truth was it was actually their only hope.  The team happily carry on in la-la land until the company breaks and the redundancies start.  Then they’re baffled: all seemed fine to them!

British industry is notorious for low productivity.  We think it’s good enough to produce quality products without worrying about how much they cost to make.  Sadly, quality isn’t enough on it’s own, because customers won’t buy anything that’s too expensive.   Having continually improved good processes is part of the answer.   Nigel blasts TQP in typically British fashion, presumably not knowing that the Japanese significantly improved productivity by applying it properly.  Japan made better stuff for less money with far fewer employees than we did. And the same is being done by many other foreign manufacturers.  British sales sagged and too many of our industrial firms went down the toilet.

Dave

Nor was Dave’s assessment of ISO9001 true for us.

We were a government department being fattened up for selling off, and AN Other Gov. Dept, our main customers, forced us to adopt the nonsense, as many other firms were forced by major customers to do so.

That it was a management control system, not a product or service guarantee scheme, seemed to slip by un-noticed, and it became all the rage. For a few years in the 1990s the weekly business pages of our local paper usually carried portraits of directors grinning like Cheshire cats at having been granted this “coveted” but footling bit of paper at vast expense.

For its primary weakness is that it does not try to dictate how you control the condition of what you sell, but how you run your firm; by insisting on tying everything to written Procedures, Work Instructions or Guides so the end result is consistent. It can be rubbish but as long its consistent rubbish… Though of course then you’d lose custom but be so hampered by corporate rhubarb and ISO-ism no-one would dare suggest how to improve it.

We had all three of those classes of document, but I never learnt the differences. I don’t think many others did, either. We were not though, at the whims of self-styled “consultants” charging vast fees for selling snake-oil to gullible directors. The directors taught themselves, and consequently invented such a pile of nonsense that the external certification body actually told them, “You have gone far too far!”

We also had another advantage: until flogged off cheap we were civil-servants, whether techncial, administrative or in support roles like store-keepers, and this did give us a strong team ethos possibly lacking in remotely-owned commercial outfits. So there was little “us-&-them-ism”: we had to do what they upstairs told us, of course, and we had the odd spat but on the whole there was considerable mutual respect, helped by most of “them” having gained their rank by proven experience. Few if any had been thrown in at the deep end merely on the basis of degrees in “management”, none had prentitious titles like “Chief Rhubarb Officer”, and so they knew what had to be done, not what “management consultant” types think trendy.

…….

Errrr, what was this thread’s subject?

Ah, The March of Technology”.

I.e. the advances of systems that facilitate the rapid breeding, promulgation and death of fashionable Those Which Can Be Dones rather than valuable Those Which Need Be Dones – for managing a successful organisation.

Consider the environment: do you really need three carbon-copies of that memo about identifying the need for another blank page titled “This page is left intentionally blank”?

On 26 January 2025 at 23:13 Nigel Graham 2 Said:

Nor was Dave’s assessment of ISO9001 true for us.

We were a government department being fattened up for selling off, and AN Other Gov. Dept, our main customers, forced us to adopt the nonsense, as many other firms were forced by major customers to do so.

That it was a management control system, not a product or service guarantee scheme, seemed to slip by un-noticed, and it became all the rage…

With respect Nigel, it absolutely was true for you!  Remember ‘Strategic Defence Reviews’?   Defence being massively expensive, all governments do them.   Their goal is to meet the nation’s defence needs without overburdening the tax-payer.  Big questions are asked: do we need a nuclear deterrent, are submarines the best way of delivering it, and, if so, how many?   And, if the Navy is going to operate submarines, what’s the best way of supporting them?  They are incredibly complex.

During WW2 British Industry struggled to meet many urgent military requirements, which generally they didn’t understand, because many of them were secret.  Thus the government set up a host of research establishments, specialising in advanced research and problem solving.  Radar, artillery, fuels, aircraft, explosives, underwater detection, wireless, cryptography, rockets, armoured vehicles, anti-submarine, anti-aircraft, anti-tank and many other examples.  They did a good job in an emergency, but very inefficient.    The Army, Navy and Air-force all had independent research overlapping establishments.   Considerable savings were achieved by merging them to avoid unnecessary duplication, maybe replacing three warehouses and their storemen.  Good organisation reduces costs and improves productivity.

Over the decades, Defence slowly rationalised their research arm, but retained ownership and recruited staff to operate them. They were a considerable management burden.   Seeing an opportunity to make money, industry lobbied government to let them take over.  And this was nectar to a government keen to reduce the number of civil servants, and is in line with the notion that organisations should concentrate on core business.   It was argued that Defence should manage Defence needs, and not be diverted into Research.   The change also suited the politicians for another reason.   Governments had been persuaded to subsidise failing industries on a large-scale, throwing good money after bad.  This problem is international, so by treaty, Europe, the USA and others agreed to change their accounting rules to make it difficult to subsidise anything, including government owned enterprises.   The pressure to privatise was enormous.

But having to sell defence assets proved difficult.   Despite years of work, they still weren’t as efficient as they should be.  Industry latched on to that, saying ‘we can’t pay much for this organisation because nothing is documented.  It’s so bad you need to pay us to take it away.‘   Doing ISO9001 properly would save taxpayer millions, but the workers either didn’t know or care.  Nor did they understand their jobs were on the line.  As Nigel says, his organisation was being fattened up, but ISO9001 was done badly because the team didn’t understand what was going on, or chose not to believe it!

Anyway, deals were struck, and new owners took over.  Their goal being to make a profit, they looked at outputs, how they were achieved, what future work was likely and when, who was essential, and what they needed to do to reduce costs.  As the highest overhead in most organisations is people, they’re an obvious target, so if in this position, get your act together!

Transferred employees were protected by TUPE for 3 years I recall, after they could be made redundant in a blink.    Those lucky enough to be delivering effectively in a well-organised group were retained.  Unlucky souls delivering inefficiently in poorly organised groups got the chop.  On average, well-organised groups usually have documented processes and improvement programmes.   Poorly organised groups tend to depend on “common sense”, and can’t improve.  Doing ISO9001 properly helps, not engaging is dangerous.

The Defence reform process was complicated, error-prone, and unfair.  Winners did well out of privatisation, losers suffered extreme pain.  And privatisation turned out to be a mixed blessing, it didn’t reduce taxation!  Various reasons. one being that in-house operations can reallocate effort internally when, not if, requirements change.   Privatisation reduces agility because requirements are contractual and cannot be changed without negotiating a new deal.   Removing, altering and adding requirements all cost money, and it’s bureaucratic. time consuming and expensive.

Management is about achieving balance, and that’s extremely difficult and short lived.  The hands-on element of the team tend to think, because they produce the final product, that they are all that’s needed.   I’m afraid that’s too simple: large organisations are complicated!   The nation cannot build nuclear submarines with traditional techniques, and especially not if those traditional methods are haphazardly applied.

All part of the March of Technology. Not physical technology, but the way organisations are engineered. They too have to be designed, and they too have quality problems, malfunctions, and become out-dated.  Much more to engineering than practical work.   May not like to hear it, but it’s true!

Statement: British productivity is the lowest of all industrialised nations.  Why, and what can be done about it?  Discuss!

Dave

Company I used to deal with was taken over by a Taiwanese chap. After a few years I asked the still British management how it was going. The owner turned up once a year and asked ‘is my company worth more than it was last year?’. If it was he took them out to dinner and went away. They never went hungry.

And yes they had ISO 9001.