TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL

In this talk, Mr. Angotti will discuss several methods for keeping high technology projects on track during the development of a piece of hardware. The projects he works on include those that involve designing such items as the mechanical enclosure, electro-mechanical elements, electronic microcontroller-based hardware with various input/output configurations, firmware, programmable FPGAs, and software.

 Mr. Angotti assumes that the project team is often not co-located and sometimes even remotely located. He also assumes that the product will be manufactured in a moderate to very-high volume. Very often, these projects have considerable tooling requirements and expenses. They can also be subject to serious quality assurance work sometimes done off premises. Sometimes, manufacture might take place at locations far from the design center.

The presentation is based on his white paper “The 12 Best Strategies for Keeping Engineering Projects on Track” that is located on his website at http://www.angotti.com/12strat.html.

Because of time constraints, he will focus on only five of these strategies during the talk. These include approaches for:

• Handling the early days of a project
• Generating a formal Specification and System Block Diagram
• Developing a plan to handle the “unknown-unknowns” for a project
• Creating practical ways to develop metrics to track progress
• Handling the inevitable project overruns at the project end

During the presentation, Mr. Angotti will describe why not handling these situations properly can get projects off track. He will share his experience in solving such project issues and invite audience members to ask questions and share their related experiences.