This is the second part of our onboarding writing.  We have seen many opportunities for growth and development in this area. In fact, the onboarding process is where those who know little about us, how we work and what we value, are guided toward a fit in our organization.  Our candidate selection and vetting process […]

The Emissions Tango There is so much to learn from this case for those who develop products for a living and automotive products in particular.  Understanding the impact of concept selection and testing of the product on the project’s success and product quality is important.  The early decisions we make regarding the development of the […]

  Why Statistics and Control Are Important to the Project Manager More from the TQM and Project Management [1] One of the purposes of statistical analysis lies in its ability to discern random variation from non-random (or “controllable”) variation. Random variation is extremely difficult to control, although we have seen situations where variance could be […]

We take a brief turn from our previous agile posting and divert to Total Quality Management tools applied to conventional Project Management with an excerpt from our book by that title. Consider our company has outsourced a significant portion of our project to a supplier, and in our evaluation of the risks via our Risk […]

  Some companies offer perks to their employees, a reward for sticking out with the company.  After all, in some cases the company invests considerable time and money into employee development. The company may pay to move them.  The company will spend some money on training the employee in the ways of the organization.  I […]

by Rick Edwards and Shawn P. Quigley How projects and processes are related If one were to describe their project to someone, they would most likely describe the end deliverable or objective of the project (a.k.a scope), the expected completion date (time) and the expected resource requirements needed to faithfully execute the plan (cost).   Nowhere […]

By Shawn P. Quigley Needs and Motivation – Organization and the Individual In our article “Needs, wants, and motivation” we discussed the correlation between the needs of an organization and that of the individuals who comprise it. This would be an example of “The Macro fit” or job fit as commonly stated in the Human […]

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 […]