efficiency, stated Peter Drucker, is doing the thing right, but effectiveness is doing the right thing – through enabling others to reach their potential – both thire personal potential and their corporate or institutional potential. (quoted in DePree, 1989, pp.19(2).
Here are some typical oversight areas:
- Enginee4ring teams fail to take other variables (such as political, community, marketing, goodwill, funding, etc.) into account before going from overview planning stage to implementation stages.
- Business Project Plans are not clearly developed to include marketing product, product requirements, personnel, quality, technical support, operations, timelines contingencies, and the realization that nothing happens as you plan it.
- Human factors are often ignroed, those that have to do with the creation and implemention of the project/program itself, as well as those having to do with the ultimate users.
- Project plans are often too narrowly focused, failing to include other elements. For example, they are often focused almost exclusively upon engineering tasks, and do not represent project milestones from other members of the project team.
- Engineering managers, put into the position of project managers, consistently badly under-project milestones.
- Product/project requirement priorities are often not clear. Projects are not developed with risk management in mind, nor are the most critical features developed first – with other elements designed to support the critical features.
- Project schedules, usually poorly constructed at the outset, are often forced to be compressed at the end. There is often “a gun held to the head” to reach completion. Consequently, final regiew, quality control and de-bugging are not adequately completed.
- Process considerations, such as procedures, rules of engagement, duties, how conflict is handled, etc., are not planned in at the beginning and grow by topsy – often badly.
That’s all fooooooolks – this is my last night of blogging for the week.
ArLyne Diamond, Ph.D. Diamond Associates www.DiamondAssociates.net
