Understanding the Intent of the Project

During my senior year in college, each of us had to work with a team to complete an engineering project. Finally, we got to move from the books to real world applications.

I can still remember one of the design projects - Reduce the Noise pollution in the Courtyard.

Some background…
There was a nice courtyard surrounded by three walls of the engineering building. There were flowers and a couple benches in this courtyard. It was well manicured and had the ivy league look with the bricks and coloring.

The issue was that few people enjoyed the patio because the air conditioning vents which were on top of the building caused a “low frequency hum’ (sorry for getting technical!) whenever they were operational. Eventually people got irritated enough that they stopped using the courtyard.

Anyway… a design team was put forth to solve this real world problem. The Design Team used all of the great tools necessary to come up with their design. They used customer interviews, QFDs for ranking and prioritizing these inputs, etc.

They verified the customer inputs by collecting some field noise data.

They translated this information into a METRIC. The metric was to get ‘X’ frequency eliminated from the courtyard (where X is the ‘low frequency hum’)

So many countless engineering hours passed. Multiple calculations, cad drawings, customer reviews, management reviews, and further modifications until they unveiled the final result.

They built a noise dampener for X frequency… and guess what happened…

They eliminated the X frequency. High 5’s were handed out to all involved. The team was ecstatic.

They invited their customers to lunch in the courtyard the day after the dampener was installed.

And the result…

The customers were not exactly happy.

The low hum turned into a ‘medium hum’ and oh by the way it was now louder.

So… if you judged them by their self-imposed translated metric.
They were a success.
If you asked the customer… they created a worse problem.

During their final presentation, they showed how their design eliminated ‘the problem’. Once again their were high 5s at the presentation.

The judges did not buy it.

The students did not understand why.

We wonder why we have so many problems with people not hitting their goals… maybe it was because we set and/or approved the wrong (translated) goal.

Give people the right goal and they will be successful.

Next up… competing metrics… sort of like dueling banjo’s for all your Southerners.