Once Upon a Time I worked while I was acquiring my undergraduate engineering degree, hell, I worked while getting all three of my degrees. My undergraduate was especially interesting, in that I did not have a mass of skills so my work was not a high-paying gig.  I am grateful for the job, but there […]

Sergeant York – and Old Homesteads Gatlinburg Area Recently, over the Memorial Holiday, Sergeant York, well, more like rewatched it.  I recall it from when I was a kid on the old movies channel.  Not when it first hit the big (or little) screen mind you.  However, I have since then had some experiences that […]

It was a wonderful learning event at the Manufacturing X.0 Southeast event.  I want to thank Lacy Ashton and Boni Quatroche for making the even and my involvement possible.  There was much to learn from the confluence of topics from AI to Big Data, from the individual to team learning and retrieval.  All of these […]

Failure: The Option Media I was once in an engineering team meeting, where the snippet from the movie Apollo 13 was played.  The scene demonstrated that famous saying, failure is not an option. I have heard this many times since then, not in business, but on other television shows and competitive events.  The thing is, […]

Risk Management from Front and Back Recently I spoke at a Metrolina PMI Chapter on Risk Management. If we have been managing projects, we know that risk management is significant to ensuring project success. Risk management starts from the very beginning of the project, the scope, and our strategy selection will all impact the risks […]

To Learn, or Not to Learn- There is Really No Question. I have spent time in a variety of roles in product development, from engineer to manager and process manager.  In the latter, as project and process manager, even in early 2000, there were organization processes and structures in place to encourage and record learning […]

The Organization Organizations, or most successful organizations, are not static.  To remain an ongoing concern the organization will need to adapt to identified opportunities.  This will require growing the talent base, either organically, that is from within, or by finding talent external to the organization.  From an external perspective, how do we know the right […]

  Career Change Recently we had a question come to us about how a person transition from one industry or a specific job title to another industry or another area of the company that requires different skills from what we presently have.  Perhaps as a way to avoid becoming stale, we may want to explore […]

Firefighting Hiding things is not a long term strategy We have recently written an article at our Assembly Mag column, Ps and Qs column on the metaphorical firefighter and things we do that encourages this behavior.  There are many variants of this specific failure mode.  To be clear, we are referring to valuing the heavy […]

Reviews of all kinds If you have been in product development for any time, you may have been involved in design reviews, walk-throughs, specification reviews, product reviews, audits and other forms. Recently I was a part of a customer presentation.  The presentation was developed to introduce the customer to a new product design that the […]