Dealing with Your Customer/Client During Your Failure Investigation

Engineers beginning their career in failure analysis must learn to deal with their customers/clients. This presentation shall discuss various aspects of working with customer/clients. These aspects include negotiating the goal of the investigation, discovering whether the customer/client is more concerned with determination of the root cause or determination if they have a systemic or unique problem, communicating to the customer/client that root causes include physical, human and latent causes, noting that customer/clients believe they know their loads and environments but really do not, noting that customer/clients believe everyone follows the rules even when they do not, and delivering bad news when the failure investigation is not favorable to your customer client.