What is quality? In a manufacturing or heavy industry, it is to minimize the defects and errors. Today it emphasizes customer satisfaction as well. It means quality is achieved if in the end the customer or user can effectively use the product. High quality is important to project success. Poor quality has a cost. Some examples are:
– Not meeting customers’ expectations
– Cost of corrective actions are high
– Team morale may suffer Continue reading
In 2004, The Home Safety Council completed the most comprehensive study ever done of the severity and causes of home injury in the United States. Not surprisingly, the rates of injury are highest among young children and older adults. While there are literally millions of home hazards that exist, the study was able to separate out the five leading causes of unintentional home injury. These five leading causes are: Continue reading
There are basically two types of risks on a project. They are programmatic risks and technical risks. A project cannot meet schedule (hence cost) without resolution of issues that affect the schedule. Events that impact the schedule are programmatic risks. These types of risks determine the risk level of the project. The assumption in making this statement is if the schedule cannot be made, then the project will be over budget. Continue reading
Most of my career was spent with the Department of Defense (DOD) industry. The many programs I worked on included a fairly difficult reliability requirement. I was taught that reliability is designed into a system. I learned that verifying a reliability requirement was done by analysis. But for the system reliability to succeed, you need to consider the manufacturing and installation of the system. This is when risk management comes into play to ensure system reliability requirements succeed. This paper explains why. Continue reading
WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF CONTRACTS?
Table 1 lists the various types of contracts and comments as to the salient features of them. The type of contract awarded is based on a number of factors including considerations such as: complexity of project requirements; uncertainty of scope; party assuming unexpected cost risk; need for predictable project costs; and period of performance. Continue reading