Project Manager and Talent A project’s success ultimately is with the talent of the team and the project manager.  There are more team members, only one project manager, and the team carries the bulk of the work even if the project manager is responsible.  The composition of the team is the very important.  Talent constraints […]

Tools and Improvement I have seen companies go through great gyrations to improve the efficiency and effectively of their projects and as a result their organization. For large distributed companies or company subsidiaries, the ability to easily share information and details can save considerable time and trauma. One example is recounted in a story about […]

Qualitative Testing Qualitative tests look for a change in a quality; for example, a color might change. Qualitative tests always involve the use of attributes rather than variables values (e.g., temperature). Consider the Kastle-Meyer test for the presence of blood–an archetype for qualitative forensic testing. The test is impressively quick and functions as a decision […]

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 […]

In our last blog post, we referred to the APQP  (Advanced Product Quality Planning) activity of DFMEA.  The post was about the attempt to perform late in a project.  The point to the DFMEA in that instance was lost; at best, if we found a serious problem, would be to abort the launch.  The post […]

Asking for more… Recently, I overheard a project manager discussing the use of a quality tool for their project. The project is well underway. Can you guess the tool under discussion?  It was the DFMEA or Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis.  There are a couple of things wrong with starting the discussion at this point, […]

Quality Project Deliveries No matter the expected delivery, objective or product from the project, to deliver a high quality outcome is the result of intention.  It comes from the understanding of the scope, the planning and execution of appropriate quality securing actions and consistent monitoring and adjustment to lessons learned along the way Quality and […]

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 […]