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 […]
The Confluence: Configuration Management, Change Management, and Project Management Like Puzzle Pieces Configuration management, change management and project management are all connected. Missing one or more of these in product development can mean exceeding the project budget and schedule at best, and at worst, the launching of a product that is more like a torpedo […]
Why formalize root cause analysis? There are many approaches to determining the root of our problems. In the automotive world, there are two typical approaches, the 8D or the 8 Discipline, or the A3 (named for the paper size). We will not go into the details of either of these approaches but you can find […]
There have been some twitter discussions going on about the validity of the term end-to-end (E2E) testing. I have been around this concept for many years and still see the validity in the term and the approach. To that end, I will describe as quick and briefly as I can since this is a blog […]
by: Shawn P. Quigley & Jon M Quigley Measurements and Bias Solely by the process of observing something we can alter the thing which is being observed. This is a known as the observer-expectancy effect. This effect is born out of conscience and subconscious biases of the observer. In the case of observing people, we […]
Many of you who have read our blog know we are fans of the show Aircraft Disaster on the Smithsonian Channel. We do not like the show for the disaster part, but the root-cause analysis aspects. These things are intriguing for engineers. Root cause analysis is an important skill for design engineers, process engineers, and […]
I have a mental exercise for you project management type people out there. In this exercise, we are going to explore the possible interactions and results of the various knowledge management areas as defined by the Project Management Institute or PMI. In this exercise, we will start with an Ishikawa or fishbone diagram. In this […]
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 […]
Risk and Time Management In keeping with our last post, we discuss risks due to insufficient time management that often result in project failures. As is with many things, the symptom of the failure has roots much earlier. In other words, when we witness the failure, it was due to some event(s) or activities much […]