Teradyne Corp: The Jaguar Project questions 1. Compare and contrast Teradyne’s traditional project execution strategy to the approach it used in Jaguar? What was similar? What was different? Teradyne’s traditional project execution strategy lacked structure and discipline. Projects were poorly planned with limited defined scope and goals. This had caused projects to expand and run over budget due to the poorly defined milestones and goals of the project. With the Jaguar project there was a large emphasis in defining processes, risk mitigation and scope.
This was different in that the engineers had to define some of the specifications instead of the traditional approach of working through issues and adding features as they go along. The similarity was in their development processes, even though there was a large emphasis defining the scope upfront the later part of development remained the same, especially in the software development processes. 2. What impact did the project management tools have on the Jaguar project?
The Jaguar project used several project management tools to track the progress of the project. A 3-point estimation was used to define best case, worst case and expected timeframes. The project also used a robust scheduling tool Primavera to help track the critical path at each point of the project. These tools had a large impact on the project. Some positive and some negative. Primavera was used to analyze the critical path, but the debate over whether it was accurate or not distracted from some of the real issues that were plaguing the project. . What lessons should Teradyne take away from the Jaguar project? There were many issues that Teradyne faced in the Jaguar project. The use of the project management tools were not fully implemented and were actually used as a tool to push out deadlines especially in the software development section. There was also a large lack of training in the tools that resulted in improper use causing lack of support from the staff to use the tools. The ompany should implement a few process improvements meeting to find what worked well and what did not work. 4. Why do you think the software challenge was larger than anticipated for Teradyne? Software challenges were plaguing the Jaguar project from the beginning. In the initial software development developers that worked on the project had no previous experience with the legacy software. Added to that those developers were also working on another project and had little to no time to spend on the Jaguar project.
This cause immediate delays from the start of the project and resulted in further delays. I think that the software challenge was larger than expected because the risks were not fully defined. Also with software development it is important not to rush the development process. This can cause large amounts of bugs resulting in longer timeframes to fix them. I also think that the development team managers were not honest with them in defining the development processes and did not account for the potential risks that may arise.
