Quality Project Deliveries No matter the expected delivery, objective or product from the project, to deliver a high quality outcome is the result of intention.  It comes from the understanding of the scope, the planning and execution of appropriate quality securing actions and consistent monitoring and adjustment to lessons learned along the way Quality and […]

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 […]

Accountability and Dependencies. There is much ballyhoo over accountability.  Accountability is very important as without responsibility and accountability a project or an organization will never survive let alone thrive.  There are times when we push for accountability; however, and few of the prerequisites for the accountability are not met.  I am writing specifically accountability as […]

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.

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 […]

Conventional Project The previous two blogs demonstrated a way to employ agile techniques. At the top level the project was executed as a conventional project.  The project had gates, a steering committee and numerous schedule layers.  The organizational structure is balanced matrix (for the most part).  The organization is distributed both by function and geographic […]

As we execute the test cases, we will likely find failures. These failures or faults will be reported into a reporting system that will allow us to track the failure resolution. We can also use that here in our progress tracking sheet.

Agile in Conventional Project Line Management The following is a story from a couple of years back.  The story is about lengthy set of verification activities (multiple iterations) in a large conventionally run project.  As many a test engineer will relate, testing is always cramped for time. Meaning, the time we want the answers is much […]

What is concurrent engineering? Concurrent engineering is when activities are paralleled that could be sequenced. Concurrent engineering can help us deliver the product earlier since we have compressed the schedule by overlapping the various development activities.  There are certain risks associated with this way of working. To be successful and not incur massive rework, it […]