One factor this can easily boil down to is the amount of resources that a company has. Should the company have the time, manpower, and money to invest in a trial, they should certainly undergo the trial themselves rather than sending it out to a CRO. There tends to be a higher amount of traceability and control when things are done in house rather…[Read more]

I can definitely understand why not getting enough praise or recognition might cause someone to leave their job. Human beings naturally want to feel appreciated for what they do. When you spend a lot of effort and time doing something, it is natural to want to be recognized for it. While you may not be recognized for every single thing you do, a…[Read more]

For me, one of the biggest motivators to work for me is the sense of satisfaction in the excellence of the work I have done. It brings me great satisfaction to look back on a project, deliverable, or any other piece of work and see how well it was done and how well it fits the needs that it was meant to meet. If something is not too good, I look…[Read more]

For myself, the three results that are listed that motivate me to work the most are having great people to work with, challenging work, and supportive boss/manager. I have had experience on the positive and negative sides of each of these, which have shaped my opinion to this point: having great people to work with spurs you on to do quality work.…[Read more]

I highly think this is due to the culture around work and the value system found in the workplace. Often times, the worth of an employee is measured by how much they can output/get done. So, in a competitive environment where employees are trying to stand out and be seen as the cream of the crop, it is natural for people to start working much more…[Read more]

A project can definitely have more than one priority. However, in these projects, it is best to determine the order of those priorities (which one is more important and such) so that proper allocation of resources can be done at the same time. When deadlines come and time is short, there may be several priorities, however that which is most…[Read more]

Ideally, all members of a project should be communicating with each other and the project manager. If that were not so, there would be no way for the PM to know what was getting done, or for different members to learn about the progress of the project, avoid pitfalls, etc. In the company that I work with, Skype IM’s, Skype meetings, emails, and…[Read more]

Unless I’m missing something here, according to the MiniSim, the AquaWhoa coating IS from another supplier: HyrdoSurf from Conmodic, AquaWhoa from AND. I agree here with the point made that much of the purpose of getting another supplier is to allow for redundancy in case of some incident, and that getting a secondary supply from the same company…[Read more]

jr377, I would have to disagree drawing from experience. There have been people who are on a project with me doing a certain task who, for various different reasons, get transferred to another project. The reason for this often has been due to people leaving the company, higher priority projects needing more of the departments resources, etc. To…[Read more]

Asking all stakeholders to identify potential risks is quite important. As said before, different stakeholders from different parts of the stream offer varying perspectives of the industry. While it’s important to include all potential stakeholders from the start, it is also very important to continue the conversation about risk throughout the…[Read more]

I’ve had experience with vendors where during a manufacturing process validation they become uncooperative. In our case, we were trying to find all of the steps of manufacturing that contain water in our product components. We can only document so much internally until we get to a supplier who gives us a component. While they were willing to give…[Read more]

I believe the best way to avoid scope creep is to define a scope and then stick to it. Any deviations should become new changes or projects separate from the one that you are working on. For example, in a project I am working on, a certain product needs to have its shelf life reduced on label. This would be a simple enough change however, after…[Read more]

In the company that I work in, engineers would open up something called a Change Order (CO) within a project to allow space to create changes to what ever documents need to be changed. The person would then redline the most recent revision of the document within Microsoft Word using Track Changes. Like mentioned in Dr. Simon’s lecture, once the…[Read more]

I believe one of the most important techniques/activities in monitoring and closing is conducting Design Change Requests. It is in this process that documents and processes are brought up to spec allowing to include several updates to a project that may not have been reflected earlier, such as scope changes, design changes, etc. It also…[Read more]

It is important to document the lessons learned during the course of a project. Documentations of decisions made or decisions/actions that would have been better if done are crucial to transferring the knowledge of the team members of others in the organization that might run into similar circumstances. While the physical documentation of these…[Read more]

When a calm and productive resolution can’t be reached in a situation like this, it is most important to try and stick to the facts and reconcile with what reality is. If something is impossible to be done in shorter amount of time without reducing quality and the deadline is short, then reality must set in that the original plan was not a good…[Read more]

From what I have seen these processes are followed pretty closely in terms of project management. What does not always stay consistent is the difficulty of the processes and how long they will take, particularly in the execution phase. Many times, issues arise in the execution stage where an expected process that was thought to be easy or have no…[Read more]

In relation to the miniSim that was done this week, it would be best to find those who have closest knowledge of these tasks (have done them before typically or something of the like) and involve them in the conversation.Like we found in the sim, the people who were more distant from the actual work needed to be done cannot be expected to give a…[Read more]

I would say that the planning phase is one of the most important phases for a project. It is one of the most critical phases in terms of getting a project started. This is not just the case in terms of having the execution happen but also getting management to be on your side to have the project happen in the first place. They want evidence of…[Read more]