Manufacturing plays a BIG Role in Product Quality We have spent some energy on the development of the product design, discussing the sorts of activities we will undertake to assure the product quality.  A quality design without the ability to produce the desired quality product is one-half of the solution.  Therefore, just like our design […]

In our last blog post, we referred to the APQP  (Advanced Product Quality Planning) activity of DFMEA.  The post was about the attempt to perform late in a project.  The point to the DFMEA in that instance was lost; at best, if we found a serious problem, would be to abort the launch.  The post […]

Asking for more… Recently, I overheard a project manager discussing the use of a quality tool for their project. The project is well underway. Can you guess the tool under discussion?  It was the DFMEA or Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis.  There are a couple of things wrong with starting the discussion at this point, […]

Quality Project Deliveries No matter the expected delivery, objective or product from the project, to deliver a high quality outcome is the result of intention.  It comes from the understanding of the scope, the planning and execution of appropriate quality securing actions and consistent monitoring and adjustment to lessons learned along the way Quality and […]

Review of Rate of Accomplishment From our earlier blog post, we discussed task dependencies and how understanding these connections improve our probability of project success as it pertains to schedule. Additional information on dependencies can be found in our book Project Management of Complex and Embedded Systems. Monitoring  Rate of Accomplishment means Measuring So what […]

Accountability and Dependencies. There is much ballyhoo over accountability.  Accountability is very important as without responsibility and accountability a project or an organization will never survive let alone thrive.  There are times when we push for accountability; however, and few of the prerequisites for the accountability are not met.  I am writing specifically accountability as […]

The blog “Testers Do Not Break the Product” was posted on LinkedIn and there were considerable responses and exchanges.  In an effort to continue that same discourse, I post some of that exchange. Many thought the language “breaking”, as did many others, to be unclear or ambiguous. The language in this discussion originates from the […]

We see some company responses to economic downturn are to eliminate staff as if that were the only way to become a viable company once again. We wonder if these companies have some cost improvement methodology behind them that would give their management other options than summarily removal of personnel.

Agile Verification Blog Recollection In our past blog posts we discussed a conventionally executed (staged gate) project with constituent parts (the verification) being executed using agile techniques. We realized we missed some pertinent information in our series post of agile verification in a conventional project. Agile Verification Prediction We talked about the burn up chart based […]

With Agile, Every Day is a Review Day The constant reviews of status of the project activities via daily Agile sprint meeting, provides the mechanism for the latest state of the project.  This includes the scrum master and product owner apprised of the situation.  I like the analogy of a pilot making course corrections. If […]