The Olden Days by Jon M Quigley I recently had a phone call with a person I met on LinkedIn. Actually, I have been having calls with them over the weeks, to talk about product development, especially the way it was in the olden days. Over the course of few discussions we began chatting about […]
Wire harness development and testing Slow is painful by Jon M Quigley Vehicle Systems Vehicles have become increasingly electrical over the year, even vehicles that are not electric propulsion. There are more features, more embedded controllers and greater communication between the electronic controllers. The range of content is from power electronics, sensor data (analog signals), […]
This is a demonstration of the law of diminishing returns. In present day, in my experience, happens vary frequently in project management.
Go to the place where the work is performed, that is the Gemba walk. This does not apply just to manufacturing, but also line managers and their respective departments as well as to project management. You want to know what is going on, what could be better, go unto the work space and watch and […]
I recently saw a post on Twitter from the Great John Cutler on allow the team to pick the tools that they use to do the work. Generally, this is not a bad idea, but not necessarily a great idea either. It sort of depends. My experience in companies that also have hardware […]
Kanban and Visual Management Kanban is a lean method for identifying and managing the work and the flow, and it does so by creating a pull through environment. We will start by identifying the work we need to do. Each work item we need to do will end up on an individual card. The cards […]
My Career I have been very fortunate in my career, and that really means very lucky. Upon graduating from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I had two job offers after sending my resume to more than 100 companies. That is not a very good yield, but it would be good enough. I selected […]
If you have been a project manager for any time at all, you probably have experienced competing demands from the sponsors for the project. The sponsor is the person(s) who drive the scope of the project in conventional projects. In some instances, the project manager may find that there are in fact multiple sponsors and […]
Value, Scope and Change Requests Change requests are part of any development project. Change requests are sometimes necessary as we learn by building and doing the work. In my experience, change requests often are born from requirements we thought we understood, only to learn by working with the product or system that we really did […]
Queuing Theory Queuing theory is the study of waiting lines and is associated with business in determining resources needed to achieve service business throughput objectives, but it does not just apply to services and material handling. Queuing Theory and Billable Hours I have worked at companies that had a target for billable hours, that well […]