By Shawn P. Quigley Needs and Motivation – Organization and the Individual In our article “Needs, wants, and motivation” we discussed the correlation between the needs of an organization and that of the individuals who comprise it. This would be an example of “The Macro fit” or job fit as commonly stated in the Human […]

Manufacturing Project The project whose scope includes delivery through manufacturing will include some quality assurance steps from the previous blog post to ensure we are able to produce the designed product to the quality expected by the sponsor. Trial Production Run and Problem Discovery The manufacturing team reviews the development of the manufacturing line with […]

Manufacturing plays a BIG Role in Product Quality We have spent some energy on the development of the product design, discussing the sorts of activities we will undertake to assure the product quality.  A quality design without the ability to produce the desired quality product is one-half of the solution.  Therefore, just like our design […]

Asking for more… Recently, I overheard a project manager discussing the use of a quality tool for their project. The project is well underway. Can you guess the tool under discussion?  It was the DFMEA or Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis.  There are a couple of things wrong with starting the discussion at this point, […]

Review of Rate of Accomplishment From our earlier blog post, we discussed task dependencies and how understanding these connections improve our probability of project success as it pertains to schedule. Additional information on dependencies can be found in our book Project Management of Complex and Embedded Systems. Monitoring  Rate of Accomplishment means Measuring So what […]

Scope Change and Failure Change happens in that there can be no doubt.  Projects must contend with this pitching deck of an operating environment while achieving the end objective.  A significant negative impact can be change.  Even controlled change can have a detrimental effect on the project success.  To fit the classification of controlled change […]

We see some company responses to economic downturn are to eliminate staff as if that were the only way to become a viable company once again. We wonder if these companies have some cost improvement methodology behind them that would give their management other options than summarily removal of personnel.

Organizational Learning Differences for the Team and Management (Mental Models) By Shawn P. Quigley In a previous post, we discussed the five principles behind Organizational Learning (L.O.). In this post, we will discuss how the different levels of an organization view the principles and why these different views make it difficult to obtain a learning organization. […]

With Agile, Every Day is a Review Day The constant reviews of status of the project activities via daily Agile sprint meeting, provides the mechanism for the latest state of the project.  This includes the scrum master and product owner apprised of the situation.  I like the analogy of a pilot making course corrections. If […]