Project Management: Elements, Tools, and Techniques for Success
Elements of Project Mangement:
Complete whatever tasks are required by the project, do so within a specified time frame, and work with the available resources.
SSS
Elements mnemonic Scope sets limits on what the team must accomplish for deliverables. Scheduling defines time limits for completion. Spending limits available resources aqnd how they man be applied to the project.
Design Reviews
Long meetings where the team presents its problem and design choices to an audience of technical professionals, who asses the design, raise questions, and offer suggestions.
Weekly Meetings:
Progress of the design project is tracked and discussed, may be the most important means for obtaining feedback from clients and other members of the design team.
Bill of Materials:
The list of all the parts in a design, including the quantities of each part required for complete assembly.
Time Value of Money:
Money obtained sooner is more valuable than money obtained later, and money spent sooner is more costly than money spent later. Captures both opportunity costs and risks, where risks are inflation and possibility that the money won’t be available later. Translated to a common frame using a “discount rate”.
Triple Bottom Line:
Used to estimate the economic, social, and environmental consequences of a design.
Concurrent Engineering:
Understanding and optimizing a product for its entire life, including design, development, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, use, and disposal and reducing the time to bring a product to market. Requires the use of a multidisciplinary design team to design a product, and its manufacturing approach, distribution scheme, and user support, maintenance, and disposal.
Time to Market:
The time it takes to get a product to the consumer. Defines a company’s abnility to shape a market.
Design for Productions: 1
Design for Manufacturing:
Design based on minimizing the costs of production and or the time to market for a product, while maintaining an appropriate level of quality. Manufacturing and design interact iteratively. Consult manufacturing experts for your design. Costs can be cut by using commercially available inputs. DFM must always keep the clients objectives in mind.
Assembly:
A set of processes by which the assembler handles parts or components, and inserts, mates, or combines the parts to a finished system.
DFA can be considered on its own or as an important part of DFM.
DFA:
1. Fewest components, standard or integrated fasteners, base component, components facilitate retrieval, max accessibility for manufacturing, repair and maintenance.
Supply Chain:
Suppliers of materials, fabricators, and distribution channels. Many companies forge links in the supply chain and successful designers understand the production and manufacturing processes of their suppliers and customers.
Design for Use:
Reliability:
The probability that an item will perform its function under stated conditions of use and maintenance for a stated measure of a variate, such as time, distance, or number of cycles.
Reliability As a Probability:
Measured in terms of failure as mean time between failures, where time can be replaced with another variate. Represented as a cumulative distribution or as a probability density function. Prefer low variance in MTBF because this makes failure more predictable and avoidable with a maintenance schedule, and also very low levels of early failure.
Failure:
Termination of the ability of an item to perform its function. Distringuishable by when and how the failure occurs.
Failure during use is in-service failure. Failures that aren’t detectable without another activity are incidental failures. Catastrophic failures of a function cause the entire system in which the function is embedded to fail.
Series System:
Chain of elements. Failure of any one causes the system to fail.
Reliability is the product of the reliabilities of each part.
Parallel System:
Function is redundant. 
Note that redundancy increases reliability and cost, so choose some redundancy and allow other parts to stand alone.
Maintainability:
The probability that a failed component or system will be restored or repaired to a specific condition within a period of time when maintenance is performed within prescribed procedures. Note the dependency on a specified condition and on maintenance or repair actions as well as time to turn the system to service.
Maintainability can be increased through use of standardized parts (because parts inventories can be more efficient) and modular components (because components or subassemblies can be replaced then repaired). Make parts with high failure rates easily accessible.
Design For Sustainability
Different fields affect the environment differently, so in general, we look at air quality, water quality (temperature change and chemical or addition of hazardous compounds), energy consumption (and where the energy comes from), and waste generation (including recyclability and market support for the recycling process). Climate change means carbon footprint. We use life-cycle assessment: inventory analysis (all end and intermediate inputs and outputs), impact analysis of the inventory, and improvement analysis on the first two steps.
Constructive Conflict:
Constructive conflict is centered around ideas and values, while destructive conflict is based around the personalities invlolved.
Managerial Needs:
Successful projects must complete the required task within a specified time fram and with available resources. Scope limits the deliverables, scheduling defines time frame, and spending limits available resources that may be applied.
Team Charter:
Contracts between team, client, and organization which lays out goals, roles, resources, deliverables, and major schedule points. Project goals are specific outcomes expected of the project. Organizational goals reflect the intentions of the larger entity.
Work Breakdown Structure:
Decompose a project to smaller, more manageable tasks. Full breakdown into two or more tasks each time you can’t determine how long a task will take or who will do it, including anything that will take time or resources, so that each sublist can be added to equal their task parent in terms of time and completion. Breakdown, adequacy, completeness, additive.
Prototype:
First full scale and usually fully functional forms of a new type or design of a construction.
Model:
An example for imitation or emulation, tested in a controlled environment.
Proof of Concept Testing:
An experiment must be designed, with hypothesis to be disproved if certain outcomes result.
Tools for Managing a Project’s Scope:
Engineering projects+creativity.
Team Charters: Scope
Agreement that the team reaches with stakeholders about what constitutes success and what limits apply to the project: Min goals, stretch goals, organizational goals, authority for proj, deliverables, time frame and limits on schedule, resources, unusual circumstances.
avoids scope creep. Lays out goals, roles, resources, deliverables, and major schedule points. Describes project to prospective team members, elicits commitment from team members, and settles conflicts about resources, timing, or scope.
Work Breakdown Structure: Scope
Decompose projects into small enough units to identify who will be responsible, establish how long the smaller task will take, and determine the resouces required to complete the smaller task. Hierarchical representation of all the tasks that must be performed to complete a design project. Breakdown until you can estimate time with confidence. Sum of subordinates in a particular branch equal the superior both in time and in completion of the tasks. Four properties: 1. Full breakdown into parts (subordinates to two or more subtasks), 2. Adequacy (time or responsibility cannot be determined, break it down further), 3. Completeness (any task or activity that consumes resources or time should be included explicitely or as a known component of another task, 4. Additive: All the lower subtasks of the hierarchy must be equivalent to completion of the full task above them. WBS does not have to be a graph.
Expanded WBS: Progress
WBS with hours and percent completion.
Team Calendar: Schedule
Mapping of deadlines onto a conventional desk or wall calendar. Include externally imposed deadlines such as commitments, as well as tea-generated deadlines for tasks developed in the WBS. Team calendar cannot by itself capture the relationship between activities.
Gantt Chart: Schedule horizontal bar graph mapping activities against a time line.
Activity Network
Graphs the activities and events of the project, showing the logical ordering in which they must be performed.
The Budget: Spending
List of all the items that will incur an economic cost, organized into some set of logically related categories. Distinction between budget for design and budget to build artifact. Budgets allow team to account for how they are spending project resources (money and hours). Categories: labor, materials, travel, and incidental expenses. Budget is why WBS must be broken down to see who is working on a task. In budgeting, think about what is possible and also keep in mind what the charter requires. MIsc category reflectrs poorly on the team and our management skills.
Monitoring and Controlling Projects: Progress
Percent complete matrix–
Relates the extent of work done on parts of a project to the status of the project overall. If we track progress along bottom of WBS, we track it for the entire project. Begin – 25%, Half way – 50%, Completed – 90%, Accepted – 100%.
Project postaudit:
Organized review of the project, including its technical work, management practices, work-load and assignments, and final outcomes. Focus on an even better job next time around. Review the project’s: goals; processes (especially ordering of events); plans, budgets, and use of resources; and outcomes Linear Responsibility Chart:
A matrix where the rows of the matrix list the activities to be performed, while an adjacent column identifies the party responsible for that activity. Makes it easy to see all members needed for a particular task.
Engineering Ethics:
Ethics is a set of guiding principles or a system that people can use to help them behave well. Professional codes are needed because they go deeper than religion or upbringing, and they are universally agreed upon in the profession. Whistleblowing is a tool to stop a faulty decision made within an institution. Look to peers and societies for ethical insight. Prescribed ethics to clients, the profession, the law, and the public (health, safety and welfare). We must be “qualified by training or experience”, avoid conflicts of interest. Agency-loyal “work for hire”, identification-loyal (aligning with institution because engineer admires its goals or sees its behavior as mirrioring his own. Use a design notebook to see patterns in behavior. Ethical issues do not arise from a single obligation. Welfare of the public is about what constitutes a good life. Listen to affected parties.
Basic Features of Solidworks:
Feature based (thread, chanfer), parametric (dimension driven functions), associative (dimensions update from model)
Reports: Oral Presentations:
Purpose, audience, organize, clear and precise, design, visually , ethically Final Technical Report:
purpose to communicate with the client in terms that ensure the client’s thoughtful acceptance of a teams design choices, include needs to be met, alternatives considered, bases of decisions, and the decisions themselves. Technical information should be stuck in an appendix. Include what recipient hopes for (solutions, ideas, etc.). Abstract, executive summary, intro and overview, problem statement with definition and framing with prior work or research, design alternatives considered, evalueation of design alternatives and basis for design selection, results of the alternatives analysis and design selection; supporting materials, often set out in appendices, including; drawings and details; fabrication specifications; supporting calculations or modeling results. Topic sentence outline. Combine voices into one.
Solidworks Questions:
Evaluation tab, analysis, sustainability. Changes as you change material. Production, use, disposal, and transport. Each material and type of manufacturing has its own effect on the environment. Years the product lasts. Global warming potential, use of nonrenewable fuel, air pollution, CO2, Methane, GW=Carbon.