A hands-on guide for creating a winning engineering project
Engineering Project Management is a practical, step-by-step guide to project management for engineers. The author - a successful, long-time practicing engineering project manager - describes the techniques and strategies for creating a successful engineering project. The book introduces engineering projects and their management, and then proceeds stage-by-stage through the engineering life-cycle project, from requirements, implementation, to phase-out. The book offers information for understanding the needs of the end user of a product and other stakeholders associated with a project, and is full of techniques based on real, hands-on management of engineering projects.
The book starts by explaining how we perform the actual engineering on projects; the techniques for project management contained in the rest of the book use those engineering methods to create superior management techniques. Every topic - from developing a work-breakdown structure and an effective project plan, to creating credible predictions for schedules and costs, through monitoring the progress of your engineering project - is infused with actual engineering techniques, thereby vastly increasing the effectivity and credibility of those management techniques.
The book also teaches you how to draw the right conclusions from numeric data and calculations, avoiding the mistakes that often cause managers to make incorrect decisions. The book also provides valuable insight about what the author calls the social aspects of engineering project management: aligning and motivating people, interacting successfully with your stakeholders, and many other important people-oriented topics. The book ends with a section on ethics in engineering.
This important book:
- Offers a hands-on guide for developing and implementing a project management plan
- Includes background information, strategies, and techniques on project management designed for engineers
- Takes an easy-to-understand, step-by-step approach to project management
- Contains ideas for launching a project, managing large amount of software, and tips for ending a project
Structured to support both undergraduate and graduate courses in engineering project management, Engineering Project Management is an essential guide for managing a successful project from the idea phase to the completion of the project.
Table of Contents
About the Author xv
Acknowledgments xvii
About the Companion Website xix
Introduction xxi
1 The Role and the Challenge 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.1.1 Why Do We Care About Engineering Project Management? 2
1.1.2 The Opportunity For You 5
1.2 The Project 5
1.2.1 Where Do Projects Come From? 8
1.2.2 Customers 8
1.2.3 Attributes of Projects 8
1.2.4 The Project Life‐Cycle 9
1.2.5 Goals of the Project/Factors in Tension With Each Other 9
1.3 The Project Manager 12
1.3.1 The Role 12
1.3.2 You as the Manager of an Engineering Project 15
1.4 Engineering Processes Can Help You 18
1.5 The Engineering Project Manager Mind‐Set 20
1.6 Next 22
1.7 About Facilitated Lab Sessions and Practical Exercises 22
1.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 23
1.8.1 Exemplars 23
1.8.2 Points for Discussion 25
2 Performing Engineering on Projects (Part I) 29
2.1 The Systems Method 29
2.1.1 Motivation and Description 29
2.1.2 Life‐Cycle Shapes 37
2.1.3 Progress Through the Stages 43
2.2 Requirements 47
2.3 Design 55
2.3.1 The Design and its Process 55
2.3.2 The Design Hierarchy is Not the Same as the Requirements Hierarchy 64
2.3.3 Modeling 64
2.3.4 Design Patterns 66
2.3.5 Do the Hard Parts First 67
2.3.6 Designs and Your Team 68
2.3.7 Summary: Design 69
2.4 Interaction of the Requirements and Design Processes with Project Management Processes 69
2.5 Your Role in All of This 72
2.6 Next 75
2.7 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 75
3 Performing Engineering on Projects (Part II) 77
3.1 The Remaining Stages of the Project Life‐Cycle 77
3.1.1 Implementation 77
3.1.2 Integration 77
3.1.3 Testing - Verification and Validation 81
3.1.4 Testing - Planning, Procedures, Test Levels, Other Hints About Testing 85
3.1.4.1 Unscripted Use of the System 88
3.1.4.2 Realistic Operating Conditions 88
3.1.4.3 Off‐Nominal Operating Conditions 89
3.1.5 Production 90
3.1.6 Deployment: Use in Actual Mission Operations 92
3.1.7 Non‐project Life‐Cycle Stages 93
3.1.7.1 Logistics 93
3.1.7.2 Phase‐Out and Disposal 97
3.1.7.3 Summary for the Post‐Deployment Stages 98
3.2 Next 98
3.3 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 98
4 Understanding Your Users and Your Other Stakeholders 99
4.1 The Four Steps to Understanding Your Users and Your Other Stakeholders 99
4.2 Case Study About the Value of Using the Customer’s Coordinate System of Value: Role‐Based Processing 110
4.3 Special Topic: Designing the User Experience 113
4.4 Summary: Understanding Your Users and Your Other Stakeholders 118
4.5 Next 119
4.6 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 119
5 How Do Engineering Projects Get Created? 121
5.1 Engineering Projects are Created in Response to a Need, or a Vision 121
5.2 How to Win 124
5.2.1 Approach #1: The Heilmeier Questions 130
5.2.2 Approach #2: Neil’s Approach: Achieve Positive Competitive Differentiation 131
5.3 Your Role in All of This 143
5.4 Summary: How to Win 144
5.5 Next 144
5.6 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 144
6 Organizing and Planning 147
6.1 The Work‐Breakdown Structure 147
6.2 The Statement of Work 154
6.3 The Organization Chart 157
6.4 The Project Plan 162
6.5 Your Role in All of This 167
6.6 Summary: Organizing and Planning 168
6.7 Next 168
6.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 168
7 Creating Credible Predictions for Schedule and Cost: the Activity Network 171
7.1 Setting the Stage 171
7.2 Estimating the Schedule For Your Project 174
7.2.1 Step 1: Define the Tasks 174
7.2.2 Step 2: Identify the Interdependencies Between Tasks 175
7.2.3 Step 3: Estimate, in a Statistical Fashion, the Duration of Each Task 177
7.2.4 Step 4: Fixed Dates vs. Derived Dates 179
7.2.5 Examples 180
7.3 Estimating the Cost of Your Project 181
7.4 Injecting Realism Into Your Estimates 183
7.4.1 The S‐Curve 183
7.4.2 Another Aspect of Realism in Schedules: Margin and Slack 184
7.4.3 Calibrate Against Top‐Down Estimation Methods 185
7.4.4 Resource Leveling 187
7.5 Cost vs. Price 188
7.6 Your Role in All of This 189
7.7 The Intersection With Engineering 190
7.8 Next 191
7.9 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 191
8 Drawing Valid Conclusions From Numbers 193
8.1 In Engineering, We Must Make Measurements 193
8.2 The Data and/or the Conclusions are Often Wrong 194
8.2.1 The Fallacy of the Silent Evidence 199
8.2.2 Logical Flaws in the Organization of System Testing 201
8.2.3 The Problem of Scale 205
8.2.4 Signal and Noise 207
8.2.5 A Special Type of Measurement: The Test 210
8.2.6 The Decision Tree: A Method That Properly Accounts For Conditional Probabilities 211
8.3 What Engineering Project Managers Need to Measure 214
8.4 Implications for the Design and Management Processes 215
8.4.1 We Need Measurements in Order to Create Good Designs 215
8.4.2 Projects Provide an Opportunity for Time Series 215
8.4.3 Interpreting the Data 215
8.4.4 How Projects Fail 216
8.4.5 Avoid “Explaining Away” the Data 217
8.4.6 Keep a Tally of Predictions 217
8.4.7 Social Aspects of Measurement 218
8.4.8 Non‐linear Effects 219
8.4.9 Sensitivity Analysis 221
8.4.10 Keep it Simple 221
8.4.11 Modeling 222
8.4.12 Ground Your Estimates and Predictions in the Past 222
8.5 Your Role in All of This 223
8.6 Summary: Drawing Valid Conclusions From Numbers 224
8.7 Next 224
8.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 224
9 Risk and Opportunity Management 225
9.1 Things Can Go Wrong With Our Project: How Do We Cope? 225
9.2 The Steps of Risk Management 229
9.2.1 Step a: Identify the Potential Risks and Opportunities 229
9.2.2 Step b: Identify the Symptoms 231
9.2.3 Step c: Select the Item to be Measured, and the Measurement Methods 232
9.2.4 Step d: Score Each Risk for Both Likelihood and Impact 232
9.2.5 Step e: Create Mitigation and Exploitation Plans 235
9.2.6 Step f: Create Triggers and Timing Requirements for Those Mitigation Plans 237
9.2.7 Step g: Create a Method to Aggregate All Risk Assessments Into a Periodic Overall Project Impact Prediction 238
9.2.8 Step h: Create and Use Some Sort of Periodic “Management Rhythm,” Wherein You Periodically Make Decisions About Risk Mitigation and Opportunity Exploitation Actions, Based on the Periodic Assessment 239
9.2.9 Step i: When Risks Actually Occur (Transition from Risks to Issues), Perform a Root‐Cause Analysis 240
9.3 Two Special Types of Risks 241
9.3.1 The Low‐Likelihood, High‐Impact Event 241
9.3.2 The Risks That We Have Not Yet Identified 243
9.4 Lessons Learned From Risk Management 245
9.5 Your Role in All of This 246
9.6 Summary: Risk and Opportunity Management 246
9.7 Next 246
9.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 246
10 Monitoring the Progress of Your Project (Part I) 249
10.1 Monitoring Progress Via Updated Predictions to Schedule and Cost 249
10.2 Making the Updated Predictions 251
10.2.1 Creating the Updated Prediction for the Schedule 252
10.2.2 Preview: Variance Analysis 255
10.2.3 Creating the Updated Prediction for the Cost 255
10.2.4 Taking Earned Value 255
10.2.5 The Rolling Wave 257
10.3 Using the Updated Predictions 258
10.3.1 Calculating the Schedule and Cost Variances 258
10.3.2 Time Variance 262
10.3.3 Variance Analysis 263
10.4 Financial Measures About Which Your Company Will Care 263
10.4.1 Sales 264
10.4.2 Profit 264
10.4.3 Cash Flow 265
10.4.4 Day‐Sales Receivables 265
10.5 Your Role in All of This 265
10.6 Summary: Monitoring the Progress of your Project (Part I) 266
10.7 Next 267
10.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 267
11 Monitoring the Progress of Your Project (Part II) 269
11.1 How the Manager of an Engineering Project Ought to Allocate His/Her Time 269
11.2 A Big Claim on Our Time: The Periodic Management Rhythm 270
11.2.1 Sequence and Interaction of Steps 274
11.3 The Steps of the Periodic Management Rhythm 274
11.3.1 Updating the Predictions of Operational and Technical Performance 274
11.3.2 Updating the Predictions for the Schedule 276
11.3.3 Updating the Predictions for the Cost 278
11.3.4 Updating the Risk Assessment and Initiating Risk Mitigation 278
11.3.5 The Monthly Calendar 279
11.3.6 The Accounting Calendar 280
11.3.7 Management Reserve Funding 280
11.4 The Social Benefits of the Periodic Management Rhythm 282
11.5 Your Role in All of This 283
11.6 Summary: Monitoring the Progress of Your Project (Part II) 284
11.7 Next 284
11.8 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 284
12 Four Special Topics 285
12.1 Launching Your Project 285
12.1.1 The Project Start‐Up Process 285
12.1.2 The Earned‐Value Baseline: A Special Project Start‐Up Task 291
12.1.3 Preparing to Operate at a Large Scale 292
12.1.4 Summary for Starting a Project 293
12.2 Systems and Projects With Large Amounts of Software 294
12.2.1 The Benefits 294
12.2.2 The Problems 294
12.2.2.1 Scale 295
12.2.3 Lessons Learned for the Project Manager About Software 296
12.3 The Agile Software Development Methodology 299
12.4 Ending Your Project 302
12.5 Your Role in All of This 303
12.6 Next 305
12.7 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 305
13 The Social Aspects of Engineering Project Management 307
13.1 Dealing With People, Becoming a Leader 308
13.2 Alignment 308
13.3 The Sine Qua Non of Leadership 311
13.4 Motivating Your Team 312
13.5 Recognizing and Resolving Conflict 316
13.6 Siegel’s Mechanics of Project Management 323
13.7 Dealing With Special People 325
13.7.1 Your Management 325
13.7.2 Your Customers 327
13.7.3 The Human Resources Department - An Important Partner 327
13.8 Your Career as an Engineer 329
13.9 Change on Your Project 333
13.10 Coping With Career Change 334
13.10.1 Foundational Knowledge 335
13.10.2 Lifelong Learning 335
13.10.3 On‐the‐Job Learning 335
13.10.4 Know and Grow 336
13.10.5 Summary: How to Cope With Career Change 337
13.10.6 Examples of Mid‐career Changes I Have Known 337
13.11 Getting Ahead 338
13.11.1 Preparing Yourself for Leadership 338
13.11.2 Getting Ahead: Understanding Your Boss 338
13.11.3 Enablers 341
13.11.4 Leadership vs. Management 341
13.11.5 Disablers and Pitfalls: How to Fail at Getting Ahead 341
13.11.6 Summary: Getting Ahead 342
13.12 Two Special Topics 343
13.12.1 Special Topic 1: Projects Whose Work is Geographically Distributed Across More Than One Work Site 343
13.12.2 Special Topic 2: Projects That Include Teams Located in Multiple Countries 344
13.13 Summary: Social Aspects of Engineering Project Management 345
13.14 Next 346
13.15 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 346
14 Achieving Quality 347
14.1 Defining the Term Quality 347
14.2 One Motivation for Quality: A Good Reputation 347
14.2.1 Quality Control and Audits 348
14.3 Quality Initiatives 348
14.3.1 6‐Sigma 349
14.3.1.1 Defect Rates 352
14.3.1.2 Justified Variation 354
14.3.1.3 Defects in Assembly 354
14.3.2 ISO‐9000 355
14.3.3 Capability Maturity Model 355
14.4 Processes for Engineering and for Project Management 356
14.5 Procurement and Subcontracting 357
14.5.1 Vendor Partnerships 358
14.6 The Effects of Quality 359
14.7 The Bill of Materials 360
14.8 Your Role in All of This 360
14.9 Next 361
14.10 This Week’s Facilitated Lab Session 361
14.A Appendix: What Distributions Actually Look Like in the Real World of Engineering Projects 361
15 Applying Our Ideas in the Real World, Ethics in Engineering 365
15.1 Applying Our Ideas in the Real World 365
15.2 Ethics in Engineering 367
15.2.1 When Does Bad Engineering Become Bad Ethics? 368
15.2.1.1 How Do Engineers Get Into Situations of Ethical Lapse? 368
15.2.1.2 Characteristics of Modern Engineered Systems that Create the Risk of Ethical Lapse 369
15.2.1.3 Complexity and Scale Introduce Non‐linearities 369
15.2.1.4 Reliability and Availability are Under‐emphasized 370
15.2.1.5 Treating Operator‐Induced Failures as Being Outside Our Design Responsibilities 370
15.2.1.6 Ignoring the Potential That Our Systems Will Be Used in Ways Other Than We Intended 371
15.2.2 Corrective Actions 372
15.2.3 Conclusions About Ethics in Engineering 374
15.3 Thank You 375
Index 377
