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Originally Posted by Don Rotolo
If you can't get everyone to agree, there needs to be a "Mayor" who recognized when the discussion is not being productive, and either steers it forwards again or, if necessary, terminates it. A smaller group may be needed to make a decision.
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excellent point! Teenagers think everything should be 'fair' and every organization should be a democracy, where everyone gets to vote.
Design-by-committee always results in a system that attempts to do everything, is too big, takes too long, is too expensive, and worst of all, it ends up doing nothing very well.
Every engineering design team that I have been on over the last 21 years had a lead engineer or project engineer who had the final authority over the whole project. You earn that position with years of experience and excellent performance.
Implementation details are left to the rest of the project team, or to individuals who are working on specific subsystems.
As I said before, you have to follow a schedule and meet your milestones, because ship-date is a milestone that will not move, and there is no partial credit (you cant ship half a robot).
As each milestone comes, your lead engineer has to make the final call "this is what we are doing, now lets move on to the next part of the design cycle".
Rather than putting things to a vote, there should be a process for evaluating each idea or concept, a way to put numerical ratings on each aspect of a design, and when you add the + and - columns up, the answer is right there. No need to vote. For engineering projects there are reasons why the best answer is the best answer, not feelings, not pride, not ego.
If you cant show the numbers that support a decision then you havent thought things through in a logical manner. (this has been discussed in other threads).