support ⁽¹⁾

In all the companies I have worked, when the product development is finished it gets passed on to manufacturing and product support but the original developer retains ownership of the design. It's important that the product support department gets full training on how the product works, how to use it, how to diagnose problems in the field and on the bench, and what happens under misuse and failure conditions. But I have never seen a product support department really own the design to the extent that they could diagnose down to component level in the hardware or line of code in the software, which means that the last line of technical support comes back to the R & D engineer. Too often, that last line is perilously close to the first line, such as when the support team are understaffed or a particularly difficult field problem arises. On each occasion, the support team need to drag the R & D engineer off his assigned project with very little notice, often within the hour of the problem arising. If the support staff are not involved in the solution, even if no design change is needed, they will not learn what the…