Below is an excerpt from our book Pries, K., & Quigley, J. (2013). Classical Techniques. In Reducing process costs with lean, six sigma, and value engineering techniques (pp. 135-138). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. This is the second part, part one is located here. Miles also identified the concept of basic and secondary functions. Basic functions are the […]

Below is an excerpt from our book Pries, K., & Quigley, J. (2013). Classical Techniques. In Reducing process costs with lean, six sigma, and value engineering techniques (pp. 133-135). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.  FAST Introduction FAST is an acronym for functional analysis system technique. FAST allows us to reduce ambiguity in the definition of a functional product […]

In Project Management One size does not fit all. Product development and project management can be very complex and complicated with variations and permutations that make a prescriptive approach impossible to produce successful results.  That goes for any brand or type of project management.  What is important is to have an arsenal of skills, tools […]

One of the benefits of agile, at least in theory, is the single product owner. In conventional projects we can have many people in the position of the product sponsor or product owner.  These multiple voices can provide contradictions in which our product development team must wade through to determine the real requirements.  Experience indicates […]

Business Imperative There was a discussion going on LinkedIn and Twitter about technical debt, and management decisions. Sometimes business imperative trumps technical debt, but you must acknowledge the technical debt, and compare the business positives against the technical debt negatives. Technical Debt We should probably start by giving a definition of technical debt.  Technical debt […]

I recently had a brief twitter discussion with Mario Lucero that lead to a lengthy discussion over Skype who lives in Chile (the world is not so large).  His recent experience suggested to him that a company that employed conventional project management to not be a good candidate for agile.  My experience ran contrary to […]

Project Management Tools and Risk Management There still remains meat on the bones of this study from Software Advice.  On LinkedIn, Joe Hessmiller had an observation that Client relationship and Risk management was far down on the list of concerns. Under the heading More Buyers Request Advanced Functionality Than Basic[1] client management and risk management was […]