Documentation and Rework Once, a long time ago, I worked at a company that was having some difficulty coordinating their development work. The product that was produced was a complex arrangement of mechanical and electrical / electronic systems. The company was ISO certified and had documentation describing how they would work, including configuration and change management. […]
Software Process and Measurement Cast podcast: The Big Picture of Configuration Management, Tom Cagley and Kim L. Robertson Configuration Management: Theory, Practice, and Application Configuration Management is a common thread that ties the various departments and organization together, facilitating coordination of effort and is fundamental to product and human growth.
In the purchasing contract with a tier one supplier, the expected the “0-kilometer” quality or failure rate is not to exceed 500 parts per million (ppm). These are failures seen before the product leaves the OEM manufacturing floor requiring product rework on the assembly line or as the vehicle rolled off the end of the […]
Ad hoc Product Development There are those that say that agile is the way and that the time for conventional project management has passed into the distance, and I would disagree. Those that complain about how poorly the conventional approach meets the objective, in my experience, often do not practice anything even remotely related to […]
Have you ever watched Air Disasters television show? If you have then you see that all too often the reason for the disaster is a series of events that lead to a disaster. Some of these miss-steps are quite small, but when added to the other miss-steps, ends up in disaster. This is often the […]
I am writing this post after a discussion with some people on product development and project management processes. The discussion took a turn to process intensive approach or not to use a defined process. There are many ideas of how this can work, for example the Capability Maturity Model Integration is an example of the […]
I recently noticed a LinkedIn post on success and failure that led me to the need to comment. The quote from the article that gave me some consternation: The minute you have a back-up plan, you’ve admitted you’re not going to succeed. ~Elizabeth Holmes Theranos Founder & CEO When I am driving a car, I […]
When we discuss risk in project management circles, we often discuss it in terms of severity and probability. There is much more to risk and how it impacts and the implications it may have on our project. Risk Probability and Severity As the saw goes, few things are certain, except death and taxes. The more […]
We can use a decision matrix to help determine the best test strategy. In this instance, the decision matrix is comparing what we believe to be vehicle testing success criterion (such as the fidelity of the test results and ability to duplicate, the speed at which we can test and meeting critical dependencies) against a number of […]
There are many ways for us to evaluate the project we have discussed the monetary evaluation techniques in our books. These business measurements provide us with mechanisms to assess the business viability of the product. There are also ways to evaluate the project strategy with decision-making tools like Pugh. In an earlier post we demonstrated […]