Not all television is not mind numbing.  I enjoy The History Channel and many other similar channels as these are not exactly learning opportunities but close.  However, my son turned us on to a show called House on Netflix[1] and it is very interesting. House (also called House, M.D.) is an American television medical drama that […]

I was what was referred to later as a latch key kid.  I was not aware of this term until long after I was through high school.   My dad was in the Special Forces during the Vietnam War and stationed all over the United States.  Any army dependent will tell you this is how it works, […]

  There are a number of challenges when developing products or systems using multiple suppliers.  My experience mirrors that of those of the Defense & Aerospace Group on LinkedIn that many systems are developed with more than one supplier, each with a sub-assembly or sub-system constituent of the entire system assigned to a multiplicity of […]

LO / OD Application by Shawn P. Quigley and Jon M Quigley We will need to start this discussion with a question: “What have you ever done that did not teach you something?” It is by the nature of any activity especially those that require coordination and preplanning either learning or development occurs. Most commonly […]

In an earlier blog post, we compared the WBS Dictionary to the Agile Definition of Done. However, we never reviewed any connection between conventional project management Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and the decomposition of the product backlog to produce the sprint backlog.  Before we can describe what completion of the item looks like, we must first […]

I was exploring twitter as I sometimes do in the morning when I came upon this interesting post.  It is true, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, waterfall is waterfall and agile is agile, and never the twain shall meet[1].  So?   The goal of any project is to successfully deliver the objectives of that project and […]

This may or may not be a true story, but I promise it happens every year.  We start with the customer organization and a supplier that the customer refers to as a partner supplier. This “partner” supplier collaborates with the customer to develop custom components for a larger system the customer sells to their customers. […]

Requirements and Benchmarking One of the things we can do to understand and develop our own requirements is to explore other products that are similar to our proposed product or that solve the same or similar customer problem.  Where there are similar needs met, benchmarking is a way for us to understand how other suppliers have […]

There are a number of factors that can influence the approach we take to managing the requirements.  I provide a brief list below (this is not an exhaustive list): the technical sophistication of the product the risk associated with a mistake distribution of the team The more technically complicated the product the more diligent our […]