When I first started modeling, my boss came to me and said “Model this…” and then proceeded to describe an area of the plant that he thought “might benefit from having a model”. Unfortunately there were no specific objectives beyond that.
To me, a new simulationist, that sounded like an ideal project. Nothing to prove… Nothing specific to evaluate… No one waiting on specific results (because none were asked for)… It even sounded like a good opportunity to learn how to model. But it was not.
“Model this” generally results in a useless project. A waste of time. Without clients or clear objectives, I could not know what to model. Without clear objectives, I had little motivation to learn how to model tricky situations; I instead tended to bypass them to work on aspects more fun or interesting. In fact, for the same reason I often did not even recognize modeling challenges, so I never learned to deal with them.
Moreover, when it was all done, what did I have to show for my time? Perhaps a cool-looking animation. It probably did not have many aspects of reality to it. Reality is driven by close interaction with the stakeholders – oops, I did not have any of them. Why should anyone waste his or her time sharing domain knowledge with me, when I was basically just modeling for fun?
And worse, after I “finished” the model, I was overconfident of my modeling skills – after all, I modeled everything I set out to model, right? Of course I was never forced to really verify and validate against the real system, so I never really had any idea how good the model really was.
Avoid “model this”. Always push for clear project objectives. More on that next time.
Dave Sturrock
VP Products – Simio LLC
Tags: Integrity, model, objective, project, simio, simulation, software
I agree with the points of this article to a certain degree that there are two points I totally agree with.
1. Without close interaction with stakeholders, there are no clear objectives in the model.
2. If we keep modelling without any clear objectives, we may become overconfident with our “brilliant” model skills. As we model more and more useless model, we could not do an actual model for customers but only able to make models for fun.
But there is on point that I keep reserved opinion. If my boss offers me a job to “model this”, I am still a new boy in simulation. I will take the job and define some objective myself in the model. Of course I am supposing that I am too new to accept a real job. I always believe practise makes perfect. So do not think modelling is wasting time.