What are we trying to accomplish with a communications plan?  Effective project management is the efficient achieving of an organization’s objectives.  To do that, we have to keep our project team informed and working toward the target.  That includes our project sponsor and other stakeholders.  Ultimately our plan should be able to quickly answer the […]

We have mapped how long it takes to prepare the vehicle for testing using the histogram. We have used the Ishikawa diagram to generate ideas we wish to investigate as causing the time to be longer than we would like it to be. Our next step is to see if the ideas suggested in the […]

In our previous post, we have learned the distribution of vehicle preparation time via the visual representation known as the histogram.  This does not tell us what causes for the distribution.  If we wish to alter this distribution, we will also need to know the causes and take some action to alter.  Enter the Ishikawa […]

I recently read a Scott Adams cartoon http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-06-09/ in the Greensboro News and Record Sunday paper and had flash backs to projects that prematurely move to the production phase.  Experience indicates that this mentality contributes to the recalls to which the consumers are subjected. Capitalism is based upon the willingness to take risks.  There is […]

After we have identified the objective and the preferred delivery mechanisms we will set about building the training.  We will consult subject matter experts, and put material together.  That material will include: Develop Training Material Course Objective and Description Rubric Lesson plan (including formative assessment questions) Presentation, application exercises and practice material Student material (perhaps […]

In our previous post we discussed training needs tied to the organization’s objectives. In that work, we uncovered the scope of the needed training to address specific areas for improvement with very specific metrics identified.  The discussion and subsequent research of the objectives also provided us with input to help ascertain the best delivery mechanism.  […]

Training development follows similar set of processes or activities as product development. First and foremost we must know what we are trying to achieve.  What is our scope? What is our ultimate objective? Those same steps we use to evoke the requirements or our product targets for our training requirements.  The objectives of our training […]

The team works toward an objective of developing and releasing software according to a schedule.  The delivery date comes, and the team has not achieved the objective.  The project manager is at a loss for words. What happened? The team then informs the project manager – “we always said the time was tight”.  The team […]

Like the Ishikawa Diagram, the Histogram can serve us well.  The histogram allows us to visualize the trends based upon a category.  It is a graphical distribution of data, in the example below we see the distribution of the duration to prepare an incoming vehicle to be a suitable device to put under test out […]

We felt the need to follow on from our previous blog on tracking testing results in the background using hidden ubiquitous spreadsheet or documents.  If all you have is a spreadsheet for tracking, then you make that visible to all relevant stakeholders.  If the company has a sanctioned or preferred way of handling “bugs” and […]