Reconciliation

Two Engineers are charged with making calculations:

• The first adds 2+2, getting 4.1 (he’s probably loaned out to the Marketing department)
• The second subtracts 4 -2, getting 1.9 (most likely a nervous stress analyst)

Recognizing that there should have been a closer dovetailing of the two answers, management executes one or more of the following:

1. Picks the Marketing answer, because it makes for a better promise
2. Picks the Stress answer, because it sounds safer
3. Averages the two answers, figuring they both must be close
4. Both Engineers, and starts over

That’s reconciliation. Well, either that, or the process of auditing a paper trail to see if we actually did what we said we would do, and explaining (or fixing) all of the differences. The term is most often found when auditing an as-built S/N to see if it complied with the intended design baseline.