1/21/2014

Teradyne Corporation: the Jaguar Project

Teradyne Corporation: The Jaguar Project Project Management Case Analysis PRESENTED TO Dr. Rupesh Kumar Pati Submitted BY Sudha T (EEPOM-05-029) Suman KR (EEPOM-05-032) Mithun Mukundan (EEPOM-05-010) Manickavasagam Ramasamy(EEPOM-05-008) Yeshaswini Rajendra (EPGP-03-193) A bout Teradyne Corporation Teradyne was founded by Alex dArbeloff and Nick DeWolf, who were classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1940s. Teradyne was the world's largest supplier of equipment for testing semiconductors Teradyne is a 45 year old corporation Sales of $1.8 billion in 2004 with over 6000 employees Teradyne corporation has following major units: Semi-Conductor Test (64% revenue) Assembly Test Broadband Test Connection Systems and Diagnostic Solutions A bout Jaguar Project In 2001, the company started planning of Jaguar, a completely new tester platform intended to create a new system architecture that would form the basis of one of Teradynes major product lines for the next decade. The project was envisioned as a culmination of sorts in Teradynes 8 year effort to improve product development process In 2001 O Brien, a 25 year veteran of Teradynes engineering organization is appointed as project leader Company decided to abolish the markets-segment-focused platform into a single platform engineering group Teradyne senior management made a pivotal strategic decision to embrace a flexible platform strategy Main emphasis was to use project management tools to streamline the product development activities P roject Management Tools and Processes Used Work breakdown structure, a detailed description of all the tasks required to complete a project, and their relationship to one another. 3-point estimation, a technique for estimating the minimum (best case), maximum (worst case),and expected times required to complete each task. Critical path analysis, which used the work breakdown structure and the 3-point estimates to identify bottleneck tasks in the development process (i.e., those tasks that determined the overall lead time of the project). Earned value analysis, a method for measuring project progress by comparing actual and expected resources (or time) expended. Q uestion1: Compare & contrast Teradynes traditional project execution strategy to the approach it used in Jaguar? What was similar? What was different?
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1/21/2014

Teradyne Corporation: the Jaguar Project

Teradynes Traditional Project Execution Strategy Planning Projects were poorly planned. The goals and scope were often not clearly defined; Milestones were not well defined, and were often missed It was against Teradynes culture to mandate the use of any specific tools, it was left up to individual divisions and managers to decide which recommendations to follow. Some divisions of the company quickly embraced the approach, while others seemed to resist or simply ignore them. Jaguar Project Execution Requirements & scope are very clearly defined. Delivery date is also finalized and adding scopes during development was not allowed Formalized project management tools like Work Breakdown structure, 3-point estimation, Critical Path analysis, Earned value analysis are used Project management tools Process Flow Data were generally not available until after a major phase review but by this point it could have been too late to take corrective action. Even within divisions, progress was highly variable. The leaders of project teams and senior management often did not have very timely information on how a project was tracking relatively to schedule The company were badly overcommitted on projects; capacity utilization was estimated to be as high as 300% Usage of tools resulting in near accurate tracking of project status Senior Management Resource allocation Clear visibility and tracking was possible Correct commitment was provided, but sometimes forced people into commitment which was not possible in real world The platforms Teradyne had previously offered flexible testers in the low/medium performance end of the device test market, Teradyne did not have a platform with the performance necessary to address the entire market Embrace a flexible platform strategy Q uestion 2: What impact did the project management tools have on the Jaguar project? Specifically, how did they change behaviour? How did they influence performance? There appeared to be conflict within the organization about the usefulness of the tools. While some members of the Jaguar team embraced the program management tools, others strongly resisted, or simply ignored them . Performance: Identification of Problems: The tools used in developing and managing the Jaguar project helped the management to spot problems early in both hardware and software. Visibility: In reflecting on the impact of the tools on hardware development, managers credited the tools with providing visibility into critical problems
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1/21/2014

Teradyne Corporation: the Jaguar Project

and enabling the team to respond. Weekly project reviews often resulted in changes to hardware development in order to optimize the critical path. Availability of Information: Rather than making the team rigid, the tools were credited with providing the information needed to respond rapidly to external changes (such as the demands of one customer, Alpha Tech, to ship a version of the product much earlier than schedule). One manager noted, The tools provided visibility into the project we never used to have. This allowed us to respond to Alpha Tech and be confident that we could hit all the milestones. Change Behavior : Hardware system were largely able to keep on track on timelines, but the software development emerged as a problem Software development division were under enormous pressure to keep the timelines The software challenge turned out to be a bigger than anticipated. Even though the hardware units were on time due to software delays the push out was delayed by 6 months for Ultra Flex systems Q uestion 3: What were the unintended consequences of using the project management tools? What lessons should Teradyne take away from the Jaguar project? Unintended consequences of using the project management tools Some of the metric were not understood by the management teams and they choose to use the metrics which was easier and understandable for them. This did not reflect on the correct project status More development resource were wasted due to the training, tracking and status update meeting Employees and development teams did not feel that it is their responsibility for project delivery and expected higher management to govern. The need to update status and maintain the project management tools created a diversion for the development teams from the real problems Lessons should Teradyne take away from the Jaguar project The need to understand and report the most important metric. Project management maturity assessment to identify strengths and weakness, and areas of improvement in the organizations project management practice Value of the project management tools has to be taught to the project manager teams The use of project management tools required a cultural change There is a need for continuous monitoring of the project progress The capable people has to be there to execute the process Information overload should be avoided Project management tools cannot be used for the development stuff where there is lots of uncertainty.

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