Engineering Solutions
has the experience and expertise to work effectively with your internal resources to
create plans for product development and process control.
After a strategic decision has been made to develop a new
product. A Functional Specification must be prepared and approved. This
becomes a controlled in that it is initially signed-off by the project task team and can
change only through a controlled signature process. Nothing
else will insure a focused development effort as effectively as a good Product Functional
Specification. Project scheduling begins with the release of the Functional
Specification.
Specifically, program and project schedules will be
developed using your personnel to identify milestones and sub-milestones. From this
comes specific tasks required to achieve these milestones, durations, work efforts,
resource requirements, task sequencing and relationships (linkages), and budget estimates.
The result is a project schedule derived from the bottom up.
This approach almost always shows that there is not enough
time, resources or budget (usually all three) available to achieve the original goals.
Refinements, adjustments to scope, dependencies, resource
allocations are methods used to shrink the schedule.
Engineering Solutions facilitates the creation of the plan
by leading your personnel through this process development during a collaborative working
session.
All relevant disciplines in your organization involved with
aspects of the schedule participate. The
process leads the participants to a better understanding of their role in project
development and the contribution, dependency, and inter-relationship of specific
activities. By having key personnel involved with the planning at an early stage, implicit
buy-in occurs.
The benefits of this approach to project development not
only include the intense forethought but also extend through the actual development cycle.
Since no one can anticipate every detail and contingency that occurs during a product
development cycle, the schedule becomes a plan, a dynamic plan. Effective control and accurate status results from
frequent, periodic updating. Engineering
Solutions can manage the updating or can train your personnel to do it.
Assessing a project’s technical progress relevant to
time and budget becomes the most difficult aspect of assessing a status. Traditional methods depend on reports from
the project leader. His/her information
usually comes directly from the resources performing the activity. Accurate information can be collected if the
project leader know how ask for it. However,
even this information may not provide an accurate assessment of the progress. There is another method that can be employed.