Unlocking Engineering Success with Inclusive Team Building

Ever wondered how to foster success in a diverse manufacturing team? We bring you a riveting conversation on the intricacies of creating an inclusive team that combines a spectrum of skills and experiences. Our esteemed guest, Dominic Vrolijks takes us through the Skunkworks approach, a unique project management strategy famously used by Lockheed Martin, demonstrating how it promotes rapid product development and equips teams with autonomy.

The second half of our discussion zooms in on the stellar work done by UniSC, an organization committed to nurturing design and engineering talent. Learn how inclusivity in team building can lead to skill development and job opportunities for the local community. Gain insights into the significance of building a portfolio early in one's career and the priceless value of having patient mentors. We also delve into the creation of makerspace, a proactive response to the evolving job market landscape. Tune in for an enlightening conversation!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're one of the manufacturing mentors, part of the manufacturing team and the biggest team by far, I reckon, and one of the most enthusiastic team. You can say that. How's the team been going so far?

Speaker 2: 0:18

Well, it's early days, everyone's still sort of finding their feet and we don't all know each other's names yet, and there's a few of us that have never met before. And then you know the mentors, so we're sort of getting to know each other. We know each other by reputation, and the students sort of have no point of reference as well, so they're you know they're lost in the woods at the moment, completely, yeah. So that's a bit of a challenge. And the other thing that is good is like we don't have like an end of semester deadline to submit a report. Not having that academic pressure with the student team is really good. It means that we can just take it at the pace that's occurring, naturally.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Yeah, so it feels like there's a not. It's not being forced right now. Yeah, it's not being forced.

Speaker 2: 1:11

And the other thing is we're dealing with a variable level of skills within the team.

Speaker 1: 1:17

So very, very broad range it is?

Speaker 2: 1:19

It is Some people have got a lot more experience than others. Some people are like completely, you know, have no background or no experience, and that's not bad. It just means that we need to make sure that those ones don't get left behind and and that there's an opportunity for everyone in the team. So I'm I think this first six months in the team is going to be some really, really important work, with not much to show for it, yep, but ultimately, longterm, I think it's really going to set the teams up so that, over the life cycle of this project, over the next 10 years, without the work that we're doing right now building and supporting the team, building a framework, making it so that it's inclusive for new members to come into the team each year it's going to really set us up for some you know, some really awesome success.

Speaker 1: 2:15

So, yeah, yeah, you can really feel their enthusiasm and people wanting to start making stuff straight away.

Speaker 2: 2:23

And and me as the you know, as the person who's always making stuff- I've got a toolbox full of solutions that are ready to go, whatever you want to do. I was going to keep a lid on that. I've got to let the students work out the solutions and be there to help them, not do the work for them. It's not what? No, it's not what any of our mentors are there for. We're there to guide them, show them what the possibilities are and then sort of unleash them on the challenge.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Yeah, and just a reminder for everyone that we have students from high school students all the way to fourth year uni students here, and we've got industry experts who've been there really industry like yourself for years and years and decades perhaps, yeah, yeah and and listen, so it's a very broad range of experience that we're, that we're covering. So it's I reckon it's all, yeah, only natural that there's a settling period where we're building the team up.

Speaker 2: 3:25

And I. One of the things I am looking forward to is, you know, it's a new generation of young minds for us to influence and poison against the establishment of big engineering Of bureaucratic red type engineering, Like don't do it that way. This is the way to do it, yeah. And and yeah oddly enough, though, you look at some of the best, particularly in aviation, some of the best engineering challenges that have been solved, and they weren't developed with this traditional, you know, a broad management, huge organization. They were done lean.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Yeah, they were the skunkworks yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:12

That's exactly the example I was thinking of. When you know, when they, you know, set up the skunkworks at Lockheed.

Speaker 1: 4:23

Can you explain what skunkworks is for for the zoo?

Speaker 2: 4:26

Well, they had a, they had a, they had to go through a rapid development, and that was Lockheed Martin. When they were away. They wanted to they wanted to, you know build these stealth aircraft and the timelines were so short.

Speaker 1: 4:44

Those back when roughly.

Speaker 2: 4:46

Like in the in the fifties and the sixties.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:51

You know the skunkworks can still continues, but the idea that, okay, well, we can't have, we can't have like the traditional approach. So they had to develop the, the fuselage, without an engine.

Speaker 1: 5:09

They didn't have the engine ready.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Yeah. So then the engine development team had to develop the engine at the same time the fuselage was being developed. So how do you actually reconcile that? How do you make both of those things fit together? And you can't. You can't change the, the flight test date. That's got to, that's fixed. So they're both working towards that solution, both of those teams and really all of the teams.

Speaker 2: 5:33

So the management approach that they implemented there was really really interesting. Lots of people have done some really good. You know there's there's a really great book called Skunt Works. There's a really excellent video on YouTube on this kind of works as well. It's if you search it it'll come up as one of the top picks and it's a really good explainer of the management process. And you think, well, what's the management process? Got to do with product development or developing an aircraft Actually, without having the right structure in place and how the teams built you sort of doomed to failure.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Yeah, it's a really good example. So the the idea of how to come up with an alternative method of rapidly developing a product. Back then the lessons sort of carry through till today. So many organizations and companies sort of forget that and they get stuck in this. You know this big organization structure and no one's allowed to make decisions and everything's got to feed up to one person who's ultimately responsible, and you do need an element of that. But you need to provide each unit of the organization with its own agency and its own ability to make decisions and determine what the outcome will be.

Speaker 1: 7:03

You know Genghis Khan, yeah, yeah. So there's a way, so much of attention. So one of the ways that he, one of the innovations that he brought to his army, was that he had exactly that little units where I guess captains or leaders of that particular unit, but they were empowered to make their own decisions. So they had a. Everyone had knew what the overall strategic goal was, but in the heat of battle you have to really react really quickly to what's happening. So then those captains then had the were empowered to make their own decisions, to see something is happening and they can react very quickly within their own units.

Speaker 2: 7:41

So that point on reacting quickly that's the key of why these alternative management structures work so well Is that it's not whether the decision is correct or incorrect. That's important. It's how fast you make the decision. If you can make the decision quickly, then you can move on. You can find you make the decision and you can find out will it work or not work. You've got to do the point yeah, and then you can move on to the next decision because it's not getting a good outcome. It's not about every decision being correct. It's about getting to the last decision that you have to make, and you can't get to that last decision before you've gone through all the others, so you've got to make your decisions as quick as you as you can. Throughout the process, there's many decisions that don't need to be made by the person with the most knowledge or the most experience.

Speaker 1: 8:32

It feels quite relevant in today as well, with the pace of technology advancing so fast that you can't really have your technological pace advancing really fast, and then you have this bureaucratic, slow moving engineering framework that is. Then, you know, using the technology to deliver products. It feels like you need a new framework, and that's what you're talking about.

Speaker 2: 8:55

Yeah, yeah, and I guess relating that back to my own experience and maturity as a product designer, as an engineer, when I made that change and being able to disconnect myself personally from the design decision that I was making and just let the decision stand on its own two feet and not getting upset if things didn't work out. When I made that shift in my own views and how I related to it, my decisions just came faster and I became a more efficient designer, more efficient engineer, because if I was no longer afraid to make poor decisions, bad decisions, I wasn't second guessing myself. I mean, I still do second guess myself occasionally, especially when a customer rings up and says oh, I've got this problem. The first thing I do is go through a checklist in my head like what did I screw up? Did I do this wrong? Did I do that wrong?

Speaker 1: 9:51

Did I make?

Speaker 2: 9:52

this mistake. I like rattled these things off of my head and I'm just like you know, in nervous, silence and then they tell me what happened and I'm like that wasn't my fault. I think we're all like that. Yeah, yeah, you know, like I think it's just a few major yeah look, there's opportunity for growth there if you can recognize it.

Speaker 2: 10:15

That's a diplomatic way of saying it. So having that maturity around decision making allows you to make decisions faster and allows you to let other people make decisions, and if you've got an organization culture where people don't get punished for making wrong decisions, that's great. Every organization is going to have wrong decisions and poor outcomes, and what's important is having a process to deal with that and to move beyond it to the next step.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Yeah, yeah the process is very important. So there's someone from your background and looking at the EVTOL team, the, the concept itself so far, and that's a lot of question. But do you anticipate any, any challenges with the, with that project itself, in terms of, yeah, in terms of your background, with what?

Speaker 2: 11:13

you do. Challenge IC is going to be cash. If we don't have the cash to spend on equipment and tooling and materials and and you know those type of expenses, then it doesn't matter how good the design is. If we don't have the funding to go down that path, that's really going to limit the opportunities. Thankfully, we've got really good support from sponsors and industry partners, so that is going to really really help.

Speaker 2: 11:49

And, to the credit of UniSC, I'm really impressed with how they've stepped up and decided to back the project. I think it's really good. I think it's come at the right time. We see lots of other universities who are doing different types of teams. I'm really really impressed with how UniSC has decided to go with a theme for the team. That is really unusual, not really a core competency for them as well, but it's definitely something where it's been inclusive enough that it's brought in a whole range of different skills from amongst the student cohort and the local community. I think that is really good and having it led as a community project supported by the university, I think is a really great way of making sure that it can last beyond the short term tenure of relatively the short term tenure of certain decision makers at the university If they move on or leave and someone else comes in.

Speaker 2: 13:01

Having the project led by the community first I think is really really good because it means that we can outlive any of those sort of challenges if they do occur.

Speaker 2: 13:10

There's a degree of resilience there within the project. It's not locked within that structure and if there is some change then the community can keep the project going and I think the local community is going to see some really good outcomes in terms of skill development and employment opportunities for the candidates who are participating. I think it's going to be a real highlight in the entry point of the careers of the students that are participating to be able to show on their portfolios that they are a part of this team. And this is what we're able to achieve. And when I worked there, I worked on this particular part of the aircraft and it's you know, it flew because of the work that I put in there. I was lucky early on I was able to build a portfolio of staff from high school, of different machining projects and throughout my entire career that's what I've done is build a portfolio so that I can demonstrate to my customers, to my employers, and it's also been a toolbox of solutions.

Speaker 1: 14:24

I reach back into it sounds like it's like you start off on really good food and you got stuck in really cool projects from the start, but, like you were saying, it was a lot of the legwork was done prior to that, right?

Speaker 2: 14:40

Yeah, so working as a freelancer for a year was really helpful because it helped me build out a portfolio of clients and also I was at the right stage in my career as well. You know I had 20,000 hours under my belt until the work, so I sort of knew my way around design software really well, and I'd also had the benefit of working with some really good colleagues as well who were patient with me. When I was younger I was, you know, pretty hotheaded If someone made a criticism of my design. I took that massively personally and I really feel embarrassed by some of the ways I reacted.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Man. I feel like there's a lot of good stories behind that.

Speaker 2: 15:27

Yeah, you know, when you've got a. When I was first learning SOLIDWORKS, the engineering manager I had you know, bless him, he would make me redo the drawing so many times because I was just really bad at it in the beginning and then eventually I got it and I was like, oh right, there's a reason behind all this.

Speaker 2: 15:49

This is the information I've got to put in the drawing Because I completely forget stuff, or I'd have the wrong material, or I had not have it dimensioned, or I'd miss the material thickness or yeah, and there's some drawings I would have to redo like seven times and it must be so frustrating for him to have to do that, and each time he'd send me back I'd be like I would take it personally.

Speaker 2: 16:15

I'd get upset about it Like, oh, you're making me do more work. You know what's wrong with this? Yeah, there was clearly something wrong with it. I just didn't want to accept it. Yeah, so but you know, we don't stay 23 years old forever. We grow up and with age comes a little bit of you know wisdom. Hopefully I don't know about wisdom, but definitely you get a little bit more patient with things. I really regret not starting a business earlier, because If I was 29 when I started a business, you'd be reading about me in the paper and not in a good way. It would have been a complete debacle. As a 29 year old, I thought I knew everything and didn't take criticism very well. That's something that has come with practice and I've certainly had opportunity for that. People have leveled lots of criticism at me over the time, but as a designer, there was this tipping point where I got over myself and then I would focus on the design. The designers bosses actually. Yeah, let the design drive the outcome for the project.

Speaker 1: 17:34

I just realised we hadn't actually talked about what makerspace is.

Speaker 2: 17:40

Well, if you work it out, let me know In a short sentence. We are an R&D service for hire, so we have engineers and machinists, product developers. Our technology stack is CNC machining, fabrication, 3d printing, laser cutting, industrial automation, electronics, and we've got a really broad offering. But it's not dependent solely on one person. I carry a lot of that burden, but we have a membership of professionals, some of which are based with us here full time and some of which work with us on a casual basis or on a project basis. So when a project presents itself, when we get a new customer and they have an idea, we can analyse the project and look at what sort of solutions does this project need? And then we can look within our membership and go okay, this is the right skill set that we need and develop a team around that solution so we can deliver the outcome.

Speaker 1: 18:43

I don't think I've ever asked you, but how did you start makerspace or did you get started with it? This whole enterprise?

Speaker 2: 18:51

Well, it was really out of frustration Back then. In 2016, 2017, the job market on the Sunshine Coast was pretty poor.

Speaker 1: 19:02

It's funny I hear a lot of stories of people starting their own thing because the job market was one of the reasons.

Speaker 2: 19:07

at least you know the statistics locally really back that up. The region, the Sunshine Coast region, has talked about a lot as being a major cluster of entrepreneurship and in large part that's not driven because people really want to start businesses because they can't get jobs.

Speaker 2: 19:28

Starting my own company, kind of, was a natural progression. It was at the right time, then. How long ago was that? So 2017 was founded, but that was after I'd spent a full, solid year not looking for work, working as a freelancer. So our approach is a little bit different. We try and be really lean and by having essentially is a vertically integrated solution where the person who designs it is typically also responsible for the prototyping solution and the path to manufacture as well. By having that integrated, it really cuts down on a lot of the development.

Speaker 2: 20:12

So we don't have to do documentation so we can share it with other people, because it's all within.

Speaker 1: 20:18

And how does that fit in, then, with coming to the EVTOL student team? Why be involved in that team at all? What's the thinking behind there?

Speaker 2: 20:32

Well, I saw it Something I've learned throughout my career. And just in general, if you want the opportunity, you just got to show up and often that's all it is just showing up. If you show up and there's an opportunity, then you get to participate and that sort of happened from the earliest. When I finished my apprenticeship in Tasmania, I was working at an electronics company and I was just working in the production area. I've been doing fairly many of work. It was interesting, it was something new for me.

Speaker 2: 21:08

But the company got an opportunity to do some lean management and the natural fit within the company was in the engineering team, but they weren't really interested in it because they weren't really part of production. They were actually even in a separate part of the building and I put my hand up and said to the boss well, I'd like to have a crack at that. He agreed. So I got to spend the next six months attending monthly workshops on lean manufacturing, which was brilliant. I really enjoyed it. Got to see other businesses throughout the state how they did things, spent a lot of time with consultants and then I got to really annoy everybody at work, changing everything around. Nothing's changed then.

Speaker 2: 21:54

Yeah that's right, and we took a lead time on one product from 104 days down to 28. At the same time, we also increased the performance and specification because it was a customer requirement and that was for these LED displays that were being installed on bomb disposal vehicles for the UN. So it was a massive contract Really changed the company. When I started, the company's turnover was about $2.5 million and then about four years later, the turnover was more than double that, but a headcount went from 28 to 34. So we didn't really increase that many staff.

Speaker 1: 22:47

So it was all those principles that we're learning.

Speaker 2: 22:51

Yeah. So we did things like we did a string diagram and worked out okay to make this particular product. We had to walk seven kilometers and we fixed that and we ended up shortening it down so we only had to walk two and a half k's. And it was that interaction with my boss there where I because I had no idea I was going to go down that path I had been six months earlier, I'd been running a live that interaction with my boss where I just said, hey, I'd like to have a go at this. That led to so many opportunities in the future.

Speaker 2: 23:26

And so to close the circle on that question about why we're part of the student team is I could see the opportunities and see the other people that were involved in it. But just being there in the beginning, just like this, just cost me a little bit of time. And it is actually really exciting to see how quickly it's all coming together and the vision that Tim Kelly's got is really brilliant to be part of. And even you know, with a session a few weeks back, he starts talking about the aerodynamics and everything and he posed the question oh, is this going a bit too deep? I was the first one to say no keep going.

Speaker 1: 24:12

I want to learn this stuff, this is really interesting. Everyone wanted to know that.

Speaker 2: 24:20

I was like I'm not going to get this information anywhere else.

Speaker 1: 24:23

It's really good, it was a brilliant session.

Speaker 2: 24:30

So that's like one of the reasons why I wanted to be part of the team. I saw the opportunity. I thought this could be really fun, really interesting, and it's an opportunity for us to like, I guess, stake our claim in the community of what we are good at and what we've been advocating for for so many years.

Speaker 1: 24:53

Oh right, and do you have any so far and understanding there's still very early stages any main takeaways so far from your involvement with the project?

Speaker 2: 25:08

Look, I'm excited to see what's coming and show up. You know, if we don't know where the project's going to go, we've got, like this, really strong vision in the organization and what's going to be great is to seeing how it progresses. And if you want to be, if you want to see that show up, just be part of it.

Speaker 1: 25:33

Don't. Thank you very much. I worries, mate Folks, this is all we have time for. If you got something out of this episode, please subscribe, share and review. We are also always keen to hear your thoughts via the details in the description, and do keep an eye out for the next episode. Until then, I'll put an onwards.