Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.

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This module aims to develop your professional identify, giving you an opportunity to practice professional skills and associate yourself with the role of an engineer in the professional world and from this develop your own professional learning goals. You need to demonstrate a practical application of engineering, design, and other generic skills, combining theory and experience and relating this to professional settings to establish a professional mindset.

In this task, you need to give a presentation that is less than 10-minutes. This presentation should introduce the portfolio of work you have been conducting as part of this module (including projects, activities, documentation of learning processes and reflection), with specific reference to your progress towards the learning outcomes and personal goals as outlined in your learning agreement. Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.

The format of your presentation is flexible, you might want to experiment with new presentation techniques that you’ve not used before, or you can use a technique you know well. Here are a few suggestions:

• Powerpoint or PDF slideshow or equivalent
• Presenting content straight from your blog/website
• Prezzi
• Pre-recording the presentation (powerpoint with audio, video) – yes this is an option! You need to discuss/agree this with the module team though.
• And any other options (e.g. presenting online) can be negotiated with the module team

What you should include in your presentation:

1. A reflection upon your previous learning experience, overview of future goals and metrics for these goals. Use the 5 prompts provided below in appendix 1 and provide a summary of these in your presentation.
2. An overview of your planningfor this module. This should include:
3. A high-level Gantt chart/plan for the year outlining the activities/projects for this module including start/finish dates and relevant milestones (e.g. decision point for design). 
4. For each project/activity, outline the following:

  i. A single aim for the project

  ii. A set of S.M.A.R.T objectives (about 3or4 is ideal). These should be the key objectives to help you meet your aim. 

1. A list of deliverables/outcomes that you will be producing. This could be single outcome (e.g. webpage/portfolio) or multiple
2. A mapping of these projects/activities to the learning outcomes (LOs) for DE602. Make sure all LOs are met at least once ideally with a variety of tasks in each. This should be done in a table with LOs listed vertically, and the projects/activities listed horizontally. The aim here is to show that all learning outcomes have been mapped sufficiently across the projects/activities with no gaps.
3. An overview of the progress towards meeting these learning outcomes. One suggestion is to colour code these with green (almost complete), amber (not complete but good progress been made).
4. The following learning outcomes are the main focus of this assessment. Here you should go into some further detail to show the work done in these areas. In particular we will be assessing your ability to:
5. An evaluation of technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.
6. Demonstrate effective professional skills including project management, liaise with industrial collaborators and develop their own internal and external professional networks, self-promotion, make presentations, research, and collate technical/other information, use IT, produce reports (e.g., technical, and visual), and search for and evaluate design and research work.
7. Review appropriate codes of practice, industry standards, management and quality issues and their application to safety and continuous improvement.

Appendix 2 has some further guidance on these learning outcomes on how to demonstrate the learning outcomes for this assignment.

Assessment criteria

For this presentation, you will be assessed using the following criteria:

Appendix 1: Five learning agreement prompts

1. Where have I been? What has been my experience of learning so far in my life? What other things have happened to me in my life that make me who I am now?
2. Where am I now? What kind of person am I? what are things that I like or don’t like? What do I enjoy? And also, what do I find unpleasant? What skills, abilities and knowledge do I have that are important to me? What do I value – what do I care about? What do I believe in?
3. Where do I want to get to? Who do I want to be in the future? What kind of life do I want to lead? What kind of work would I like to do? what things do I need to learn and develop now to help me in life and work?
4. How will I get there? What precisely do I need to learn and how will I learn? What processes will I use to learn things I want to learn? What help might I need? What other resources might I need?
5. How will I know if I’ve arrived? How will I assess my development? How will I know if I’ve learned to the level that I need? How will I recognise that I have gained the capabilities and knowledge I need

Here are also some further resources on reflective practice and learning contracts.

• Guide to reflective practice/writing: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/asc/documents/public/short-guide-reflective-writing.pdf
• Further information about learning contracts: http://www.resources.nes.scot.nhs.uk/ti/LearningContracts.pd

Appendix 2: support material for each learning outcome in this presentation

Note that this is an excerpt from the fuller ‘learning outcomes and activities mapping’ document presented in the Study Materials area on MyStudies.

LO3 Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.

This relates to showing that you have gone through a process of evaluating risks. These could be:

• Physical risks, where you might do a risk assessment for an activity or set of activities to determine what the risks/hazards are for people/equipment/other resources, then propose some responses to mitigate unacceptable risks
• Data risks, surrounding data security, storage, currency and how you mitigate these. Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.
• Project risks, where you might do a risk assessment for a project itself, determining what external factors (e.g. University closure, delay in equipment delivery), or internal factors (e.g. you getting ill, your laptop not working) and how you can plan to mitigate potential risks. You might also consider the risks of not succeeding in meeting your aims and how you will manage, communicate and mitigate this. Is the project too ambitious? Are the project objectives likely to change? Is there a currency issue with it? will the outcome become dated quickly? How to mitigate against this?

Tools that might be relevant here include: risk assessment, root cause analysis, swot analysis, feasibility study, FMEA, sensitivity analysis, method statements, risk management/planning and possibly others.

There are some good videos/courses on this topic on LinkedInLearning. Other useful resources include:

1. Introduction to tools and Techniques for risk management: https://www.duedil.com/blogs/tools-and-techniques-for-risk-management
2. Engineering Council’s guidance on risk for Engineers: https://www.engc.org.uk/engcdocuments/internet/Website/Guidance%20on%20Risk.pdf
3. HSE guidelines on risk assessment: https://www.hse.gov.uk/simple-health-safety/risk/index.htm
4. ISO risk management guidelines: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:31000:ed-2:v1:en

LO4 Demonstrate effective professional skills including project management, liaise with industrial collaborators and develop their own internal and external professional networks, self-promotion, make presentations, research, and collate technical/other information, use IT, produce reports (e.g., technical, and visual), and search for and evaluate design and research work.

This relates to building your professional skills in as many of these areas as you can, some further notes:

• Aim to gain knowledge and experience with project planning and management tools/processes as much as you can. Some examples include MS project, prince2, sprint, slack, developing Gantt charts etc.
• Liase with collaborators wherever possible. Take recordings/minutes/photographs, get testimonials, references, letters of support wherever possible/necessary.
• Develop your own internal and external professional networks wherever possible. Attend events (the University hosts careers events quite regularly!!), be open and active in discussing your work and developing an interest and curiosity in topics that are of interest to you, even loosely.
• Develop a strategy for self-promotion, make this something you are actively doing. Visit the careers centre. Talk about this with other students and professionals to get ideas and feedback. Consider what social media might work for you, LinkedIn, facebook, Instagram, twitter. Consider how some of these might be useful for you (or not!). Develop a strategy for developing your CV, think about what you can do to do improve this in the coming months.
• Aim to make presentations on the work you do. This is also a form of self-promotion, but is a great way to show off the great work you are doing, to get feedback, to build networks and of course to gain experience and confidence in presenting to others which is an important professional skill.
• Understand the difference between primary and secondary research and how/where these might be useful in the work you’re doing.
• Develop digital/IT skills wherever possible and where you think these will be something useful for you in the future.
• Aim to write high quality technical and visually impressive reports/documents/posters etc. These don’t have to be long (in fact conciseness is always best!), but make everything you produce a product that you can show off to others as a sign of your capabilities.
• Master the use of google scholar to search for academic literature (, but also work on developing your skills in specifying search terms and in making judgements on the quality of sources to get the best quality and most appropriate material to learn from and utilise. Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.
• Be active in discussing/finding new sources of relevant information for the work you are doing.
• Reference good quality sources professionally using the Harvard method in all reports, presentations, posters etc.

Again, there are great videos/courses on LinkedInlearning on many of these topics. Other useful resources include:

1. Setting SMART objectives: https://www.managers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CHK-231-Setting_Smart_Objectives.pdf
2. Simple guide to project planning: https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/project-planning/project-planning-step-by-step.php
3. Introduction to Project Planning: https://www.apm.org.uk/media/2155/introduction_to_project_planning_1_2_ebk_0.pdf
4. Dept for Business, Skills and Innovation: Guidelines for managing projects: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31979/10-1257-guidelines-for-managing-projects.pdf
5. Updating Google Scholar settings to link to the University collection to access all the University`s paid subscriptions as well as open-access academic resources:

• Go to Google Scholar click the three horizontal bars in the corner to view the menu
• Click Settings
• Click Library Links and search for
• Click `University - Find it @  - you can also click `Open Worldcat - library search`
• Click `Save`

1. A good guide to Harvard Referencing (there are many online): https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/library/public/harvard.pdf
2. Primary vs Secondary research: https://research.com/research/primary-research-vs-secondary-research
3. Software available for students at UoB – note LinkedInLearning has many great software guides.
4. Beepurple runs UoB events for professional/business development: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/careers/start-your-own-business/entrepreneurship-workshops/index.aspx

LO5 Review appropriate codes of practice, industry standards, management and quality issues and their application to safety and continuous improvement. d

This can relate in showing an awareness and relating your own practices in general to the codes of conduct or codes of practice of the professional bodies you might want to become members of, e.g.

• IMechE
• IET
• IEEE
• ISEA
• IED
• Others that you are interested in persuing (e.g. Chartered Management Institute).

Or it could relate to British, EU, ISO or ASTM standards that might relate to some activities you’re doing, e.g. in preparing or testing samples according to the standard.

It could also relate to showing an understanding/application of total quality management (TQM), Kaizen/continuous improvement methods, Toyota Production System, Kanban methodology, reliability and quality processes. Evaluate technical risks and address risk in design methodology and work with technical uncertainty.

Some useful resources:

1. TQM introduction: https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/what-is-total-quality-management-TQM/
2. Demming’s 14 points: https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
3. Toyota method article: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/still-learning-from-toyota
4. Benefits of Kaizen and Kaizen Events article
5. Guide to Kanban: https://www.wrike.com/blog/kanban-methodology-ultimate-guide/#What-is-Kanban
6. Reliability and quality: https://www.reliasoft.com/resources/resource-center/design-for-reliability-overview-of-the-process-and-applicable-techniques
7. Access to British, EU and ISO standards through (goto British Standards Online): https://libguides.brighton.ac.uk/az.php