Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
My last article covered a scalable model for lean product development depending on the number of projects and technical objectives.
Let’s start with the foundational elements from this model:
In my previous article we established the lean product development goal statement as:
We then derived high-level objectives as follows:
Given our primary goal of developing a profitable product, our objective in the design process is to maximize customer value and minimize cost. From a financial analysis standpoint: we pursue products with the highest possible margins (ie. charge the customer “as much” as possible, and make the product for “as little” as possible). Of course we also want to sell “as many” as possible. [Read more…]
A generally accepted principle for a successful business is great people, processes & products. This can be further simplified as “maximizing customer value and minimizing cost” of the product.
Consider the following:
The Quality Triangle provides a method to establish priorities for a project. It strives to balance time, cost, and quality (or scope instead of quality). It does not include reliability.
Now I am a bit bias as a reliability engineer and believe a projects set of priorities should explicitly include reliability performance. Of course, there are many potential priorities, yet reliability certainly can make or break a product, it’s market acceptance, and an organization’s profitability.
So, given a quality triangle based set of priorities, how does reliability fit in? [Read more…]
Have you ever worked on a project with no deadlines, unlimited resources, and boundless scope? Probably not.
You may have worked under the guidelines of a quality triangle, also known as a project management triangle, iron triangle, or project triangle.
Why is that? Why the limits to our ability to create a product or improve a system?
First, the world we work and live within has limits. We have only so much time for work, only the available resources, and limited knowledge. We do our best with what we have to work with at the time.
Second, as I once was told while working on an accelerated test design, ‘if there isn’t a deadline, you’ll happily tinker with the plan and get the testing done.’ My boss was right of course.
The set of constraints shape our projects and products. By understanding the set of constraints, specifically how they frame decisions, then we can complete complex projects. [Read more…]