Many organizations have a series of activities or processes (design reviews, analyses, verifications, validations, etc.) that they go through to produce the end product or service. The work will start with some kind of development process, which may be a matter of days, months or years, depending on the complexity of the product or service. […]
The trigger is a new concept to those acquainted with the FMEA approach to problem elimination. The trigger event (or threshold) is how we know we need to invoke our risk reduction activities and is direct responsibility of the person monitoring. Risk Response and Contingency Budgets Each risk dollar amount at stake is multiplied by […]
The SEV, PROB, and CTRL fields quantify the amount of risk to which the project is exposed. The higher the number, the more risk to the project. This information is used to prioritize and generate action to reduce or eliminate (transfer) the risk. Also, we wish to identify the detection—how do you know the risk […]
We recommend a modified version of the FMEA approach to assessing the risk. The approach is tailored to the needs of project and program managers. We will model the time line as a control plan with minimal controls other than the typical tollgate reviews and, perhaps, team meetings. We know from personal experience that treating […]
Experience suggests risk management happens after we have already encountered numerous and severe risks. We can see engineers bringing “risks” to the project manager when we are already witnessing the symptoms and the impact to the project is inevitable. To be relevant, risk management has to occur when there is time to plan actions that […]
Risk management is often considered a project management function, but that is not necessarily so. For any sort of endeavor we will be well served if we have some consideration of risk and the management. For example, our previous blog posts discussed configuration management. We saw how a wayward configuration management (or lack of configuration […]
We received some questions about how configuration management and change management work together. Configuration management is a component of the change management process. The business requirements or demands drive the scope, which is a project management function (requirements elicitation and control of scope). On completion of the elicitation, we have the scope baseline for the […]
Another piece of the configuration management pie is the ability to move backward and forward from revision to revision. To demonstrate the importance of this concept I will relate a story. There once was a developer who was writing in assembly language for a new product. He was incrementally developing the features for the product […]
Configuration auditing occurs so we can verify that what we said we were going to do actually happened. MIL-STD-973 specifies two flavors of auditing: functional and physical. Functional configuration auditing occurs when we verify that the change functions as the engineering change proposal specified it would. A change can be to hardware, software, or both […]
Configuration control is generally, what first comes to mind when somebody brings up the topic of configuration management (CM). While it lies at the heart of the system, all the components of a CM system are critical. The purpose of this component is to: Maintain and control configuration baselines (known and defined states) Document and […]