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INTERESTING ARTICLES
Ten Tips for Effective PM in Design Organizations
Engineering design organizations are well known within the Project Management community as among the hardest places into which to bring effective project management. Technology market demands are fluid, with dynamic requirements that quickly ebb and flow. These changes are hard to control, yet schedule end dates are often fixed and always too soon. Finally, many technology companies have a pervasive engineering mindset and these managers often believe that technical innovation is the key to business success, not operational efficiency or good people management. In fact, good people management practices are often dismissed within technical companies, by statements such as "I don't do touchy-feely," or "we don't have time to waste on that stuff." Read more >>
Bridging the Engineering/Project Management Gap
Hey, Engineers! Ever have trouble understanding how this Project Management stuff you hear so much about is actually useful?
Hey, Project Managers! Ever have trouble getting engineers to actually do the right things on your projects?
Well, here's a real life example from Motorola SPS demonstrating how engineering and Project Management professionals were able to bridge the gap that often separates the two groups. The results were outstanding: two critical design projects that will ultimately be used in Motorola's cellular phones were finished on time, meeting customer expectations. This compares to earlier projects that were often months late and didn't perform as expected. Read more >>
Managing Product Development Risk
Product development at Intel has become increasingly complex as the company moves from delivering independent components to delivering usage-centric platform/ingredient systems. To better address the business issues that could prevent the success of the platform strategy, a product development risk process was developed and deployed. This process is based on the standard corporate risk management methodology and uses a database tool to provide consistent deployments across teams. The current process focuses on qualitative assessment of risks across product development. The deployment of this process has improved the quality of product development processes and reduced last-minute fire-fighting responses to issues. Active risk management. using common processes and tools has resulted in increased communication across large platform development teams, accelerated product launches, and quick responses to ecosystem changes. As teams gain experience in active risk management the focus will move towards more quantitative analysis. The future of product development risk management will tie schedule and risk management more closely together with Monte Carlo simulations to improve the predictability of launching a platform with the needed feature set in the time-to-market window. Read more >>