Originally Posted by
TBC Retired
777 was the last program I worked on at Boeing where I felt they did everything pretty much as it should be done. "Working Together" was the motto and that meant not just consulting with customers, but coordinating internally by having 'design/buil'' teams working with each other all the way rather than emerging from their individual tunnels at the end of the process to find miscommunications and things that didn't work together properly. After that program, Boeing dismantled their traditional design matrix organizations which served as checks and balances on each other, but required lots of staff. Later programs seemed to have lost that magic and each follow-on project was mandated to have a faster and cheaper design/build/test/certify cycle than the previous one. Most of the low hanging wasteful effort was eliminated long ago and it was value added activities that started being cut. I felt that trend culminated on the Max program which kicked off with a misguided dream by program leadership that they might actually be able to eliminate flight testing altogether because prediction methods and computational models were so accurate and mature. Pure hubris. Every program I ever worked on had unanticipated show stoppers which surfaced during flight testing and required panic fixes, yet that basic lesson seemed to have to be constantly relearned.
IMO, the day Alan Mulally left Boeing was the beginning of the end of "Working Together." I'm not surprised at Boeing's current situation. Look at the KC-46's being delivered with trash, and tools left in them. It's like WTF is going on? Seems like a dire situation IMO.