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 […]

There are many ways for us to evaluate the project we have discussed the monetary evaluation techniques in our books. These business measurements provide us with mechanisms to assess the business viability of the product. There are also ways to evaluate the project strategy with decision-making tools like Pugh. In an earlier post we demonstrated […]

  I have recently had an exchange with Thomas Cagley on LinkedIn in response to an article “The Agile Mindset“.  Comments around emotional and organizational maturity were made and Thomas Cagley asked the questions about which one comes first. I said I think emotional maturity must come first.  Without the ability to handle the “real” […]

Project Prioritization  There are two levels of prioritization for agile. The first is the product backlog – the prioritization of the scope of the project.  The second prioritization is how we populate the sprint contents.  The top priority product backlog items are used for the decomposition for the sprint, but there may be prerequisites that […]

Recently I was talking with a company that has achieved the level 3 (defined) CMMI from the Software Engineering Institute that provides a measure of an organizations maturity and capability.  During this conversation, I had a flash to another company that had aspirations of being a level 3 but could never make it beyond their […]

Below is an excerpt from our book, Project Management of Complex and Embedded Systems for those that believe the “V” model means single pass product development (as if) – think again!  This book has a significant automotive perspective, complex, highly tooled machines that must meet and government regulations.   Embedded Development Overview[1] Embedded software development […]

Below is an excerpt from our book, Total Quality Management for Project Management[1] Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot […]

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 […]