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Freedom from Project Surprises Newsletter |  |
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Dear Subscriber, Announcement: New Website Online This subject of this month’s newsletter is design projects that span multiple physical locations. This subject frequently tends to generate frustration and anguish among the team members, above all with the design leader for the project. Jeff Jorvig
Business management commonly has a positive view about design projects that are spread across multiple physical locations, for the key reason that it maximizes resource utilization. This may be fact or fiction; nevertheless it unquestionably is the perception. More designers and a more diverse team are assumed to produce a faster project timeline, at least from a first order view. The design team leader views this scenario with apprehension and skepticism, since he or she foresees a battle in communication along with mounting frustration as the project deliverables roll in, due to missed expectations. Global resource utilization on design projects has been around for over 15 years, yet it is still viewed as an unpleasant challenge by the design team leaders. The negative view within design is often driven by an expectation that the design cannot proceed efficiently without the ability of informal discussion taking place throughout any given day. This is a valid concern to a certain degree, however the impact can be mitigated with a reasonable planning strategy. The extent to which daily communications is necessary is inversely proportional to the level at which the project execution details and expectations are mapped out and communicated. Essentially, the success of a multiple location design project rests squarely on the level of up front planning and subsequent documentation completed for the project, prior to the commencement of design activities. Achieving anything less than crisp clarity of design deliverable expectations will undoubtedly increase the chances that additional unplanned design work will need to be completed, once chip integration begins. More work? Definitely, but far less than the unplanned and un-scoped activities that you would face as the design deliverables roll in from remote locations, without proper planning. I personally do not feel that the documentation and/or planning activities should be greater than what you should be doing anyway, even with the entire team in the same room. My experience has shown that planning; planning and more planning followed by execution have always provided the shortest path to “production” release.
The first step in keeping your teams synchronized is allocating quality time on design partitioning, expectations for design deliverables and design block electrical and functional requirements. This must be followed by completion of high grade documentation that allows successful dissemination of this information. To address one aspect of the documentation obligations I suggest the creation of a design guide for each of the level of hierarchy of the design, allowing the capturing and communication of these critical planning steps. The guides would include the systems level, chip level and block level details of the design. The information in the guides must include the electrical requirements typically in specifications, the expected design deliverables, the design results, the design process/design flow and act as a high level checklist (guide). When done properly, the guide will insure that everyone on the team follows the prescribed design process. This is indispensable for projects involving multiple location design teams. A second type of document you should also consider is an agreed upon set of “Best Practices” to cover the fine points of “how” your design activities will be completed. There are always many “right” ways to implement a design. A best practices document insures that everyone is doing his or her design the “same” right way. Some of the items I would expect to see addressed in a best practices document include version control, design kit and version, team meeting expectations, simulation matrix expectations, valid reference libraries etc. A third item you should consider is a chip level design meeting that is held at a frequency of about once per week. These meetings can be accommodated at multiple locations by one of the hundreds of web meeting providers available for sharing visual material. The audio content of the meeting is best handled as a conference call. The weekly design meeting meeting is where you can discuss changes in scope, best practices, spec updates, design flow, design process and the like. Solicit the team to find out what they need out of these meetings and make every effort to cover those requirements. The output of this meeting should be an update to the design process documentation followed by distribution of the same.
Your workstation project data is being backed up every night and you have nothing to worry about, right? Let me add some financial perspective to your precious design data. What would the financial impact be if the project you have been working on for the last five months disappeared or the library became corrupted? Assume you had six people working on the project with an average salary of $90,000. In salary alone you would have lost $225,000 for the five months of work. Assuming a modest 10X revenue/cost ratio for those five months places the potential revenue loss for the five month delay at roughly $2,250,000. This yields a rough financial exposure of a data loss for this imaginary project on the order $2.5M Needless to say you will probably also have caused damage to your customer relationship. Are you still comfortable that there is nothing to worry about and your project is safe? What about a fire, flood, theft or earthquake? Is there a disaster recovery plan in place that ensures ALL your necessary project data is stored in a safe offsite location? If you are not sure about the offsite backup copy of your data it may be worth your time to begin asking some questions now, before you are placed in a situation where you wish that you had. Every organization should have a disaster recovery plan in place that allows you to be up and running on new hardware, in a new location, in a short period of time. No question that I am fanatical when it comes to data backups. It’s just one of these things where I have never really needed it but I sure want to make sure that I do not get caught off guard, without my $$$ valuable data. I want to do everything possible that I can today, to mitigate the risk of a painful loss of data. I know my data is safe, is yours?
If you have any specific questions that you would like to see answered here please send me an email and I will address them anonymously, unless you indicate differently. I would also like to hear about potential topics for this newsletter.
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