How can you apply engineering management best practices to different industries?

One helpful thing is to talk to people who have been through similar projects you are planning to engage. You can do that by finding suppliers and vendors that are acting in the areas where you are defining objectives. Like, if your project is to construct a specific infrastructure for a chemical process, look for EPC companies that have been designing those processes, engage them in an RFI process with the initial requirements and objectives, and learn from their responses and questions. Be open and straightforward, ask for references, and also talk to those referenced people. You will be surprised about the amount of useful information you can get that will help you define the scope.

It is human to need context and a clear destination where to arrive. Our brain needs a clear destination to have a framework to make clear decisions and stay on track. For every engineering team I've built and led, I love to give them a clear vision of the value we need to present to our users, and what success looks like using SMART goals, so it has a quantitative aspect to measure.

In my experience, Risks can be identified from experience (yes, those times you were panicking and running around like a headless chicken but managed to solve), and by keeping a log of all the risks and uncertainties that materialized into issues you will get a great tool for the future. Now, uncertainty is an everyday pain you need to keep in line by defining correctly scopes, and needs and even allowing the team to listen to the pain directly from the users. Uncertainty kills projects, our job is to remove as much as we can, knowing that it will never disappear.

Optimization always comes from the same base: People, Processes, and Tools. It is impossible to optimize anything if the People who participate in it are not the right ones, not well prepared, or simply need a push to the right path. After that, it is important to have data (measure everything obsessively), to make informed decisions, and try to find the right framework to manage the right optimization process.

Humans have multiple motivation drivers, every human has a different one. As leaders, we must take the time to know and understand the context of each one in our team to know how to motivate them. Pre-made motivation packages, cliche programs, or trying to measure everyone in the same way, always leaves gaps and it is hard to keep teams engaged and motivated.

8. Follow best practices and processes for defining goals and planning: - Conduct research - Brainstorm design ideas - Create a prototype - Test the prototype and then use your findings to make changes and/or improvements