Imagine, a story based on true events. This is not John Lennon’s Imagine. Imagine you are an executive and you are sitting down to your early morning breakfast with the daily paper. As you read the paper, you find an article about your company and you are stunned. The article is not a flattering article […]
Onboarding Defined First, we should probably explain or define onboarding. Onboarding is the collection of activities associated with our present staff socializing and training our newly acquired talent. The older employees take time out of their day to demonstrate behaviors and pass on specific knowledge and skills. Onboarding New Hires Recently a person that I […]
I have been re-reading my copy of Introduction to Quality Control by Kaoru Ishikawa. If you have been following our blog, you will know we frequently write on quality items and it is not strange for us to read these types of books. However, there is a reference in this book that takes me […]
We can use a decision matrix to help determine the best test strategy. In this instance, the decision matrix is comparing what we believe to be vehicle testing success criterion (such as the fidelity of the test results and ability to duplicate, the speed at which we can test and meeting critical dependencies) against a number of […]
Optimism is a Kind of Blindness Perhaps it is because I have seen the word optimism abused that I say optimism is a kind of blindness. Optimism like hope is used to justify our limited planning and reduced talent. Through optimism, we encourage troops to charge across a field that will surely end in their […]
First of all, I hate the word human resources for our employees. This verbiage starts the discussion as if people were fungible. That people, their talents, aspirations, motivation and capability are identical. That is simply not true. I just got out of a discussion with a company that left me feeling hopeful. After working in […]
Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach. This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]
Why Statistics and Control Are Important to the Project Manager More from the TQM and Project Management [1] One of the purposes of statistical analysis lies in its ability to discern random variation from non-random (or “controllable”) variation. Random variation is extremely difficult to control, although we have seen situations where variance could be […]
Some companies offer perks to their employees, a reward for sticking out with the company. After all, in some cases the company invests considerable time and money into employee development. The company may pay to move them. The company will spend some money on training the employee in the ways of the organization. I […]
By Shawn P. Quigley and Jon M. Quigley Communication and Motivation We have discussed some of the different theories of motivation and the role that the organization plays in motivation. Now we will discuss how the employee is responsible to the organization in the realm of motivation. At first glance one would say that it […]