Netzplantechnik. Network planning technique. German project management teaches critical path analysis under its own name, with its own DIN definitions, as part of engineering and business curricula. The dependencies between tasks are modelled explicitly before the work starts.
engineering
Endurance testing
Dauerprüfung. German manufacturers run endurance testing — doors opened and closed hundreds of thousands of times, engines run for thousands of hours, switches cycled to failure. The failure point is found deliberately, in a laboratory, before a customer finds it.
The work breakdown
Der Projektstrukturplan. The work breakdown structure. A German project is decomposed into work packages, each with an owner, a deliverable, a duration and a number. The plan is not a list of tasks. It is a structure, and the numbering shows how each piece hangs off the whole.
The inspection associations
Der TÜV. The German technical inspection associations trace back to the steam boiler inspection societies of the nineteenth century, formed after boiler explosions. Today they test vehicles, lifts, pressure vessels, playgrounds and medical devices. An independent body decides whether a thing may continue to be used.
Tolerances
German mechanical drawings specify permitted deviation for every dimension, using standard tolerance classes. Nothing is simply a measurement. Every measurement carries the range within which it remains correct.
The technical drawing
technische Zeichnung. German technical drawing is governed by DIN standards covering projection method, line types, dimensioning, section marking and title block content. Two engineers who have never met read the same drawing identically, because the conventions are national and taught.
The standards body
The Deutsches Institut für Normung maintains tens of thousands of standards. DIN A4 is the famous one. Most of the rest govern things nobody outside the trade has heard of.
A standard is a problem somebody already solved, written down so that nobody solves it again. It is prevention in its most literal form: the mistake is designed out before the work begins.
Process capability
German manufacturing measures whether a process is statistically able to produce within tolerance, as an index, before any particular part is inspected. The question asked is not whether this piece is good. It is whether the process can produce good pieces.
The socket
The German Schuko socket earths through side contacts that engage before the pins make electrical contact, and it is recessed so that fingers cannot reach a live pin. The safety is in the geometry, working before the user has done anything.
The project management standard
The German standard for project management defines the terminology, the process model and the required documents. Project management in Germany is itself standardised — there is a DIN number for how to run a project.