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 […]

Product development work has variation brought on by the product, as well as the organization.  Though there are many approaches out there, prescriptions that are based upon the type of organization or the type of product.  These approaches may have some relevance but ultimately things are not so easy to allow a prescription, “take two […]

By Jon M Quigley We have discussed the Failure Mode Effects technique a few times in the past.  Though Failure Mode Effects and analysis seems to be a powerful tool, the problem is you do not know if the FMEA is effective and perhaps you will never know.  The Failure Mode Effects Analysis tool, theoretically, allows […]

The product owner impacts the sprint set up through the business case. This person is responsible for ensuring the input to the scrum actually makes business sense, and by sense we are talking about economic sense.  The product owner is responsible for ensuring there is business value, without that, there will be no sprint.  The […]

 The Learning Organization We are developing an online class at Value Transformation titled Learning Organization and Project Management.  In this class we wed the discipline of project management with the learning organization and motivation.  As we work and develop the material we consider opportunities that are available for an organization to grow and become more […]

Not a Verification Problem I recently had a flash of a project from the past. The project had a fixed delivery date.  The project was to deliver a system through iterative and incremental deliveries. Sounds pretty good right? An iterative and incremental delivery of sub systems and components to the verification group in a way […]

Common Lessons Learned Mistakes, Misconceptions and Things Left Unsaid By Rick Edwards and Shawn P. Quigley Why organizations fail to exploit their own lessons learned. “There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience”.   – Archibald MacLeish Lessons Learned – Really? Too many organizations understand Archibald’s […]

Below is an excerpt of our book Testing of Complex and Embedded Systems Pries, K., & Quigley, J. (2011). Chapter 4. In Testing Complex and Embedded Systems (pp. 33-35). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.   Basic Principle of Testing The verification and test group is there to provide some critical and unbiased review of the […]

Manufacturing Project The project whose scope includes delivery through manufacturing will include some quality assurance steps from the previous blog post to ensure we are able to produce the designed product to the quality expected by the sponsor. Trial Production Run and Problem Discovery The manufacturing team reviews the development of the manufacturing line with […]

Manufacturing plays a BIG Role in Product Quality We have spent some energy on the development of the product design, discussing the sorts of activities we will undertake to assure the product quality.  A quality design without the ability to produce the desired quality product is one-half of the solution.  Therefore, just like our design […]