We have seen our product and our sales volume grow, and we begin to see that rate of growth slow. We are entering the maturity phase of our product life cycle. In the maturity phase we are no longer acquiring customers at our previous rate. The market is becoming saturated; perhaps there are newer versions […]
If we have developed a product that is useful to our clients, our production volumes will grow allowing us to improve our product cost and pricing structures. Additionally, besides the volume purchase of material cost improvements, we will work with our manufacturing line, improving those processes and subsequent first pass yields thereby reducing the associated […]
In our previous blog, we developed a product that was based on market research and perceived opportunity. We have tested that product both from the market perspective and the quality expectations from the customer and our own business case requirements. Now it is time to make the product available to our clientele. We are concerned […]
Our previous blogs have been largely on product development issues. We realized that we really have not discussed the product development life cycle in depth. One model of the Product Development Life Cycle is illustrated below. Our next series of blogs will cover the product development life cycle from this perspective: Development Introduction Growth Maturity […]
Have you ever heard this before at work? Can you do me a favor? As I was leaving a work place one day, I overheard a gentleman on the phone talking to what certainly sounded like a co-worker. Upon termination of the call he was tetchy. He started with, “nothing is too difficult for the […]
I have been brought back to this topic many times over the past few months. Hits production is sort of like “hitting the fan.” We release our product after development and then put our fingers in our ears hoping to not hear the metaphoric explosion at the plant. It is no wonder. We have the […]
The team works toward an objective of developing and releasing software according to a schedule. The delivery date comes, and the team has not achieved the objective. The project manager is at a loss for words. What happened? The team then informs the project manager – “we always said the time was tight”. The team […]
Perhaps some of you recall our post on project commitment. We have a continuation of that story now that is revealing. In that post we saw how not communicating clearly about actions that could possibly happen or actions that were not even remotely possible can put our project at risk. In that post, we show […]
When I was but a young engineer, I was developing an embedded product for a small organization whose product line went all over the world. Partially through the development of the product, a new permutation became needed. The owner of the company, also an Engineer that at one time did work for NASA, asked me […]
Like the Ishikawa Diagram, the Histogram can serve us well. The histogram allows us to visualize the trends based upon a category. It is a graphical distribution of data, in the example below we see the distribution of the duration to prepare an incoming vehicle to be a suitable device to put under test out […]