We have seen the word “layoff” used during a reduction in force. A reduction in force is a mass firing, often engendered by management ineptitude but sometimes driven by market forces. A layoff occurs when we temporarily dismiss an employee, but we provide preferential treatment for them when the market bounces back. Even with the […]

Teams must grow; teams cannot be simply appointed and anointed. We may have a designated group that evolves into a team, but this emergent phenomenon takes time. It takes time to discover the strengths and weakness if each member of the group, understanding that ultimately transforms into trust, the backbone value/concept for any successful team. […]

We have never seen a meaningful employee evaluation system. The abominations are generally designed as a tool to assess the performance of the employee with respect to corporate goals. When they present the illusion of quantification, the values are really qualitative and they will inflate over time as people are ‘soft’ about providing ‘real’ assessment. […]

People in education often like to implement “programs.” In fact, we call this syndrome “program-itis” because it leads to inflammation of the budget. As with many corporation, we see people who want to improve a situation decide to follow “best practices” without verifying that these are, in fact, best practices. They can only be best […]

The Pareto chart (not to be directly confused with the Pareto probability distribution function) is a simple approach to revealing significance in data. Before we plot our chart, we need to complete some initial work: Gather the data in a natural format (count, floating point [decimal], dollars, etc.) Sort the data from high to low […]

We have been on a bit a tear (or rant) about FMEAs. We suggest the FMEA documentation is part of the core of a design process. The ultimate approach we have seen is that of Michael Anleitner (The Power of Deduction: Failure Modes and Effects Analysis for Design, Quality Press, 2010), which uses functional analysis […]

There is only one way to describe this scenario and that is via a story.  Consider the organization that is coming to the end of the project.  The product is a complicated subassembly that goes into a larger system and has numerous interactions and incarnations of the design.  They are late in the delivery of […]

We submit that a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) review is a form of design review. After all, one of the purposes of a design review is to try and remove defects before they appear in the product and that is the entire rationale for the FMEA in the first place. Yet, most of […]

Risks can have origins in communications and are not the sole province of the stakeholders and sponsors of the project. Sometimes the organization damages itself via the structure.  We are all familiar with the functional organization, often referred to as a line organization or stove pipe organization in which we group the company by discipline. […]