The principle or act of collaboration sounds so simplistic but in fact, for those of you who have experienced it, and I’m sure many of you would agree, that on occasions it can be quite the opposite. One of the dictionary definitions, (they all vary slightly), cite collaboration, as “the action of working with another person or groups of people to produce something”. This, essentially is what my job as an engineer is all about, but it’s not always that straightforward.
Working towards an end goal in design and development means you have to be prepared to work across many teams with their own specialised parts of the puzzle to solve. Consequently, this frequently leads to a difference of opinion in terms of agreeing how to move forward with a project and disagreements regarding how long the process will/may take. More often than not it takes a great deal of tact, diplomacy, patience and compromise to resolve a highly complex technical issue, which can be anything such as the choice of material, having to redo a CAD drawing, or dealing with component tolerances for example.
I think there is no doubt in everyone’s mind we have a job to do and that is to deliver for our client, but particularly with MedTech products it is very important to remember the product is being developed to improve the quality of life of an individual with specific medical needs. So if you put this all in perspective, sticking together and working hand in hand to benefit the end user is not that difficult to achieve after all.
