Ford

Lots of resources. TDRMs are great places to learn. Lots of systems of lessons learned and best practices, but they are not enough to get the whole picture and mistakes still happen.

There are lots of people that are very good at their jobs. There are wonderful people who will help you constantly at WERS, or PDLs, or whatever other archaic/unruly system Ford is currently using.

People are typically easy to talk to and will do their jobs. You can go around and stop by practically anyone's desk and discuss an issue; you will come to an agreement and a path forward. And know that you'll only have to prod them 3 times to get what they promised you.

This will completely depend on your group, but mainly your supervisor.

Your group is your program, NOT your commodity. Ford is completely oriented towards making a vehicle fit together, NOT making each component work the best. This is supposed to cause the different commodities to come together, but it rarely does. It also causes repeated mistakes to happen. So you'll see the same issues on multiple programs because the same commodity engineers don't talk with each other that often.

Also, products are moving so quickly that by the time an issue is detected, another program already has it in the pipeline. Issues are caused by a lack of communication between the different engineers of the same commodity and when specs change in one group that cause issues in another.

There are so many supervisors who seem like lost workers. They have no idea what they are doing or how they got into their position. Even though they have a dozen people reporting to them, they will also be releasing parts and are too busy to BE a boss, or especially, a leader. Because of that, you will be on your own. Fend for yourself; most people will not try to help you with your issues. Rarely, yes, someone will, a bit, but that's rare.

So many reporting systems! The same 5 pieces of information will need to be reported 90 times a month. Redundant work takes up 2/3 of your engineering time. Management implicitly favors this work rather than making sure everything else is complete.

Train your supervisors and managers to be supervisors and managers. Being a good engineer is the worst qualification! Those people rarely have the people and organizational skills to be a good supervisor.

Force commodity, engineers, finance, buyers, and so on, to sit together. So many issues can be solved by doing this. If someone changes jobs, then they have to move desks.