[amoruso]

I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying miss the point entirely. It's not about analysis, it's about communication. It's one thing for domain specialist to have a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of their specialty; extracting a relevant summary for non-experts is something else entirely. If you've ever been in a meeting where you had trouble getting your point across, you should read this. Make diagrams like Tufte does to get your point across, make more detailed ones as backups if you need to dive deep into details.

http://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-cha...

[7952]

I think there is a tendancy to trivialise the difficulty of communication on large projects. I have had people tell me that "it is not rocket science". Well actually, maybe it is much harder than that. A small team can design a rocket engine. Getting a small team of managers to know all the right facts is very hard and on many projects seemingly impossible. And that is on projects where you can have very large margins of error. Obviously that is not always possible building things with strict mass limits.