After we have identified the objective and the preferred delivery mechanisms we will set about building the training.  We will consult subject matter experts, and put material together.  That material will include: Develop Training Material Course Objective and Description Rubric Lesson plan (including formative assessment questions) Presentation, application exercises and practice material Student material (perhaps […]

Training development follows similar set of processes or activities as product development. First and foremost we must know what we are trying to achieve.  What is our scope? What is our ultimate objective? Those same steps we use to evoke the requirements or our product targets for our training requirements.  The objectives of our training […]

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 […]

Continuing with our communications theme and agile methods, we discuss the question, “what did you do yesterday?”  This simple question places a check in a few project management boxes starting with the mechanism for the control of the output – specifically the feedback portion of our project control system.  Learning what happened yesterday (coupled with […]

Another beneficial attribute of Agile, particularly Scrum, is the daily sprint meeting. In this very short and focused meeting that includes the immediate project team and as needed the sponsor, we will learn much about the state of our project. The questions three that are up for discourse are: What did you do yesterday? What […]