During a process review session this week, I got involved in a terrific conversation about Smart Part Numbers. You know what I'm talking about - those cryptic SKU identifiers so popular with the folks in the warehouse, on the shop floor, in production planning. There is logic and structure to the characters and the numbers, structure that codes identification and classification details onto those bin labels. We are having problems with item WC1-644-A019910 Oh, that's because the trim press is…
Between business requests and breathless vendors, I am getting caught up in the growing tide of interest in "data visualizations" - managers requesting highly interactive, highly graphical, highly intuitive analytics interfaces (think Minority Report). But what are we trying to accomplish here? We keep on hearing about "executive dashboards", a heads-up display of in-my-face KPIs, or statistics and exceptions delivered automatically to my e-mail and/or Blackberry. However, when I ask management folks to get a bit more specific - how…
McDonald sent a nice comment on my last post - he's writing a lot about project management lately, and we even chatted about some research he's doing around boomer flight. Since I don't get a ton of comments, I thought I'd respond with a post, instead. He poses the question: I am wondering if documentation of the communications associated with coding and testing (emails, archiving of successive release of code, meeting recordings, archiving of test results, etc.) can in any…