The impact of the retirement of Boomer engineers is something I have been tracking for some time. It poses a serious threat to productivity in engineering organizations. While there are process and organizational changes that can be made to address that threat, there are also some technologies that can make an impact as well. The folks at Cadalyst approached me to write about that as a topic. Here’s a quick excerpt of the article.

Engineering is an iterative process. Some things you get right immediately. Other things you don’t. You hope all the mistakes are caught before a product is delivered or launched, realistically, that just doesn’t happen. Some problems slip through the cracks and eventually come back to you as change orders.

It is at that point that an engineering manager must step into the role of crime scene investigator, attempting to reconstruct the product-development process to determine how a problem occurred and how to resolve it when, all to often, the original designer or engineer is no longer with the organization. They might have retired, taken a promotion, or moved on to another company. In an age when the massive Baby Boomer generation is ready to retire and disgruntled Gen-Xers are left in their wake, it’s an all too familiar reality. So, now what happens? In short, you have to figure out what went wrong.

The whole article can be found on the Cadalyst site here.