There is a saying: “if you change form, fit or function, you change the part number.” On the surface this seems like a good saying. People use this saying as rule of thumb to determine if a new part number is required. Taking out new part numbers cost the company some administrative time and effort […]
Every time we make a decision, we reduce the probability of some risks but may increase the probability of other risks. Consider where the following story may fit into our discussion. We have a project that should have, in fact, started months ago to meet the desired production introduction date. Unfortunately, that did not happen […]
There are a number of quality tools that can help to evoke the risks that may be associated with your project. One such tool usually associated with cause and effect is the Ishikawa diagram. We can use this tool to explore risks as well. We will explore what happens (cause) and how it will impact […]
We can use value analysis and value engineering techniques to improve our product cost structure and ultimately our value proposition. The analysis phase of this activity is called value analysis. The design phase of this activity is called value engineering. We are a bit constrained during these activities since as we have a product already […]
We perform risk audits on projects to ascertain whether we are deviating from the desired budget, schedule, and quality levels we specified at the start of the project. At the 50,000 foot level, risk auditing looks like the following: Define the problem Choose an audit team leader Choose an audit team or let the leader […]
We would like to thank those that have sent us some ideas. To sweeten the pot, we make the offer below. We have decided to extend our story acquisition for the configuration management book. Please send your stories and techniques to my email address at Jon.Quigley@valuetransform.com Elaborate all that you can (2-15 pages) without divulging […]
Experience suggests risk management happens after we have already encountered numerous and severe risks. We can see engineers bringing “risks” to the project manager when we are already witnessing the symptoms and the impact to the project is inevitable. To be relevant, risk management has to occur when there is time to plan actions that […]
We received some questions about how configuration management and change management work together. Configuration management is a component of the change management process. The business requirements or demands drive the scope, which is a project management function (requirements elicitation and control of scope). On completion of the elicitation, we have the scope baseline for the […]
Another piece of the configuration management pie is the ability to move backward and forward from revision to revision. To demonstrate the importance of this concept I will relate a story. There once was a developer who was writing in assembly language for a new product. He was incrementally developing the features for the product […]
Configuration auditing occurs so we can verify that what we said we were going to do actually happened. MIL-STD-973 specifies two flavors of auditing: functional and physical. Functional configuration auditing occurs when we verify that the change functions as the engineering change proposal specified it would. A change can be to hardware, software, or both […]