Design to the Abilities: Use these five perspectives to improve functionality and reduce lifecycle costs

摘要

Early in my engineering career, I was primarily focused on designing for functionality: to provide a desired capability based on discussions with individual project stakeholders. Because I had experience in the petrochemical industry prior to becoming an engineer, I was fairly successful in anticipating the needs of various stakeholders. I also found that engineering departments often were more interested in how many projects an engineer completed annually, within budget and on schedule than in the quality of the projects, so long as operations and maintenance did not complain too much. In the plant, however, the feedback path to the engineer was relatively short, and plant operations and maintenance concerns were more immediate.