Reliability leadership

Reliability engineers often have difficulty educating senior management on reliability issues and communicating effectively with them. Senior leaders, while bright and informed, frequently lack the technical training to follow the arguments. This paper discusses an executive short course developed at the request of a "big three" automaker, which teaches executives about reliability using only graphical methods. This allows engineers, leaders and general managers to communicate using the same medium. In particular, managers are taught which graphs to request, how to interpret them, and what to avoid. Case studies are used extensively. Experience suggests that this is an effective way to develop better technical understanding by managers and better communication with their reliability professionals.