First of all, I hate the word human resources for our employees.  This verbiage starts the discussion as if people were fungible.  That people, their talents, aspirations, motivation and capability are identical. That is simply not true.  I just got out of a discussion with a company that left me feeling hopeful.  After working in […]

Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach.  This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]

Recently I was talking with a company that has achieved the level 3 (defined) CMMI from the Software Engineering Institute that provides a measure of an organizations maturity and capability.  During this conversation, I had a flash to another company that had aspirations of being a level 3 but could never make it beyond their […]

Risks and Communication Management A significant portion of successful project management is due to communication, so it should stand to reason that ineffective communications can be a significant source of project failures.  Everything from evoking scope and requirements, prioritizing objectives, to team building requires effective communication. Communication is used in keeping the project team in […]

Risks and Risk Management We continue with our series on the taxonomy of failures in project knowledge areas  looking at risk management. In this case turning our breakdown of the project failures toward risk management.  Risk management is fundamental to project management as we reduce or navigate the potential impediments to the success of our […]

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 […]

We have recently posted how assumptions, left unquestioned can damage a project. It is similarly true for the product when we use models and simulation to generate our product.  In the course of building these models, we will know some things for certain.  Some attributes of the model we may think we know for certain […]

Below is an excerpt from our book, Project Management of Complex and Embedded Systems for those that believe the “V” model means single pass product development (as if) – think again!  This book has a significant automotive perspective, complex, highly tooled machines that must meet and government regulations.   Embedded Development Overview[1] Embedded software development […]

  Why Statistics and Control Are Important to the Project Manager More from the TQM and Project Management [1] One of the purposes of statistical analysis lies in its ability to discern random variation from non-random (or “controllable”) variation. Random variation is extremely difficult to control, although we have seen situations where variance could be […]