Mere Scrap of Information – The Route to the Product I am a guy, and grew up in the 70’s.  My dad was a Vietnam Vet serving in the 7th Special Forces Group.  I grew up watching action movies.  My favorite actor of that era was Clint Eastwood, and one of my favorite movies Fist Full […]

The Olden Days by Jon M Quigley I recently had a phone call with a person I met on LinkedIn. Actually, I have been having calls with them over the weeks, to talk about product development, especially the way it was in the olden days.  Over the course of few discussions we began chatting about […]

How do new ideas occur to us? What is the secret mixture that enables this spark that creates something new?  I have long wondered this, including when watching my son build things that I found interesting, and with no clear sign of what of the source of that idea that became reality.  I saw him […]

The unevenness or mura of the work wreak havoc on our work. Project demands fluctuate and working on multiple projects likewise creates or exacerbates the unevenness. In product development work can get heavy around gate reviews as the project must accomplish certain expectations and milestones are reviewed in the gate activities.  One functional department may […]

The Manufacturing Innovation Network Breakfast went great last week.  Nearly all of the seats were full, and there was a plentiful of discussion afterward.   The discussion was about the role of automation in the not so distant future.  We talked about how automation and drones are now even working in the fields. Robots came about due […]

Recent events have prompted us to preempt our CMMI requirements management series for this waste of company resources that we can only attribute to an overly politicized work environment and fear.  The downside of functional or siloed organizations is demonstrated in the sentiment “fix your own sandbox”. Complications of the Organization In general, the work […]

We continue the exploration of the Poka Yoke post.  In the last post we discovered in building the product (late iteration) we have found that building the product has some undue complexity.  Upon further exploration we find that the design engineers suggested spending some time to Poka Yoke these devices.  The project hierarchy decided to […]

There is nothing like a real life story for demonstration.  This is a true story on product design, and a technique called Poka Yoke. In this case, the product is a complicated set of vehicle systems.  There are a number of pressure sensing elements, all the same type of sensor and distributed in a relatively […]