I would rather be an engineer for a good number of years before considering trying to become a manager. It all comes down to you want the extra responsibility and accountability. Speaking with the general manager at my workplace now,…   Read more»

I agree with the class on this topic. There are a number of people who will stay at a job even if they don’t like it if it is stable. But there are a good amount of people who leave…   Read more»

The disconnect of being rewarded for compliance is fairly standard in industry. They may stress the importance of teamwork and having a common goal but in the end everything is business and everything is means to an end. This means…   Read more»

Motivation is very important to a project manager and their team. The project manager should be able to get the team excited or inspired to make progress toward a common goal. It is important to do this without sounding too…   Read more»

The study does make sense. Often times people do not end up doing the exact job they wanted to do. They may have to settle for what is stable. In doing so they have to find something they enjoy about…   Read more»

I am most motivated by being able to help out others and answer questions. That is, I know that if I perform at my best, learning as much as I can and succeeding in as much as I can, then…   Read more»

For one of my graduate classes, we were given the opportunity to research one question about traumatic brain injury that we had. It started with a broad scope and eventually would narrow and focus in on our topic. My question…   Read more»

Personally I have no experience with procuring materials, however I know an admistrator of senior medical daycare who deals with a budget set by the state, specifically the department of agriculture. One of the things that must be purchased with…   Read more»

For my senior project in my undergrad, I had to develop a Speech recognition MATLAB code. This involved taking several of samples of identifiable vowel sounds as a baseline. The issue was how to compare somebody’s voice to the samples…   Read more»

In my opinion, those general processes are the intent or basis for any project. Of course not everything works out like that in real life. A project may start off following this guide but there are many unforeseen variables that…   Read more»

Working in manufactoring, especially with new automation technology, it is interesting to see the culture of how things changed to improve. For one, it is all done online mostly since the main engineers and programmers are based out of either…   Read more»

At the point of an FDA recall, yes I agree that a change notice must be had to fix the issue as soon as possible to make the product acceptable and safe for public use. As it was already on…   Read more»

In addition to monitoring the costs and variances of a project, it is also very important to monitor all of the documentation and the lessons learned. As discussed in other posts, these are very important for backtracking and improving. One…   Read more»

Keeping work logs and all the proper documentation is important for projects and even after a project is closed and moved on to the next phase. I do not have any personal experience with FDA audits however I do know…   Read more»

Logging information is essential for progress in a project. Working in automation, we keep daily fault logs for the computer system and the robot error codes in order to have a full time table of the day to see how…   Read more»

One project manager responsibility is to deal with the unknown and the unexpected. There are many instances where a device may fail a verification test or trials are not proceeding as planned. The team may become ill or on family…   Read more»

As stated, a team is comprised of people and is therefore susceptible to the unexpected. As a PM, it is important to understand that people are entitled to vacations and deal with emergencies. There is always proper procedure for dealing…   Read more»

Missing a milestone, depending on what it is, can be very debilitating or a minor setbacks. Milestones are set as goals met by a PM in order to show their progress to their boss or their customer. It usually happens…   Read more»

Contingency plans should always be in place when on a timeline that a group must have work done by. There is always something that can go wrong and will go wrong. One strategy to ensure that everything goes according to…   Read more»

When revising a Gantt chart due a missed milestone, like everyone has stated, resources and time should be centered around R&D to make up for the missed milestone and to ensure that other milestones are reached on time successfully. The…   Read more»