Archive for April, 2009
Does the BOM Really Matter?
Posted by Chris Williams in Uncategorized on April 29, 2009
A development team works together to define Parts that together define a Product:
- A Part is a collection of information that is highly interconnected within a Part and across Parts.
- A team is made up of people from different domains or organizations which provide different points-of-view and skills to the development process.
- The development process is chaotic and converges through effective trade-off and awareness.
15 plus years ago concurrent engineering was established as the standard development strategy. Concurrent engineering maintained that a Team must be co-located and cross-functional and that by doing so they would overcome and best manage the magnitude of relationships and trade-offs that exist between Parts and people. Any product development book written in the last 15 years will detail concurrent engineering and go as far as detailing the impact of how distance between people has a direct affect on the outcome of the development process. Maximum effective distance is accepted to be 50-100 feet depending on the book and supporting research. Distance between people is directly related to a Team’s ability to stay aware.
Concurrent engineering has been under continual siege. Co-location is all but destroyed, replaced with distributed and out sourced Teams while at the same time product complexity increased, timelines and budgets reduced and face-to-face team meetings have been replaced by email.
A culture of micro messaging has taken hold in life and product development.
Does distance have a connection with BOM? Does a BOM improve a Team’s ability to stay aware? PLMers love to debate the BOM and approaches to BOM management. How people organize Parts has no basis in keeping people informed. Let Team members organize Parts how they see fit. Let messages find people no matter where they are. Let people find information about Parts when they want in whatever structure they want.
A Twitter World, Fad or Here to Stay?
Posted by Chris Williams in Uncategorized on April 29, 2009
Call it what you want, twets, email, or IM. They are all micro messages that replace face-to-face or personalized means of human communication. In product development it is clear why messaging has replaced face-to-face. Co-located cross-functional teams have been ripped apart by outsourcing, corporate mergers, budget cuts and the beleif distributed teams work just fine. At the same time product complexity has increased and timelines and budgets have been reduced. Face-to-face team meetings are gone, replaced by constant micro messages that stream into inboxes everywhere and ever part of our lives. “I copied you on the mail”, “Didn’t you read what I sent”, “My inbox is full” or “I haven’t done email yet” are all things we find ourselves saying everyday…
Can constant messages streaming onto your desktop replace a face-to-face team meeting? Do all these messages become to much information? How do I find something when I want versus when someone wanted to send it? Development teams everywhere are scratching their collective heads on these questions. No matter the answers it is is clear that electronic messaging is here to stay! The question is how do we best utilize it?
Have you ever been looking at your inbox, today mine has 1245 items, and wondered which ones do I care about? Or which ones are about what I am working on? Or how many people have stopped deleting message, just in case they need them later?
#COFES2009 Twits, Tweets & Twitters
Posted by Chris Williams in Uncategorized on April 20, 2009
Twitter certainly out paced the dead horse of interoperability that is the typical hallway blabber at COFES. Over the last three days I heard people say Twitter more than I have heard people say Facebook in the last 6 months. Maybe Twitter is just new and Facebook is an old story, or maybe Twitter will really impact the product development process and/or PLM technologies. To be clear the topic certainly divided the crowd.
In a meeting held by Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity there was standing room only and many were turned away at the door. Who knew Jim was so hip and cool… The opinions in this discussion ran a wide road. That said the divided group did agree that many of the Twitter profiles, at least in PLM, are really lurkers. You know those creepy types that peer in your window and listen to your conversation. Quickly a new class of Twitter profile was defined, the twurkr. The twurkr is more creepy than the cocktail party eavesdropper, the twurkr extends the lurker creepiness by posting for only a promotional purpose. It will be interesting to see what happens to the twurkr over time. Any way I think it is clear that social-media will have an affect on the PLM market. The question unanswered is when and to what extent…
Vuuch is proud to be part of this movement and very proud to have been awarded the technology of the year award at the closing dinner.
Vuuch Renews PTC Partner Agreement
Posted by Chris Williams in Uncategorized on April 10, 2009
PTC and Vuuch have renewed their partnership agreement. As PTC dives head first into Social Product Development the relationship between the two companies gains strength. As an extension of this Vuuch will be attending the 2009 PTC User Conference that is just around the corner… Come check us out to learn more about the renewed PTC Vuuch relationship.
Social media at the enterprise has certainly stirred things up and every day gathers more mind share. While people have not defined a clear approach to ROI they do venture forward. Two weeks ago I purchased a new laptop from Dell and got into a conversation with the sales person about the tools they are allowed to use. What I found very interesting is she was not allowed to navigate to MANY different web sites and she had some limited IM capability, BUT SHE WAS ALLOWED TO USE FACEBOOK. Her explanation was that many Dell employees have created groups within Facebook that they use to connect. So if they know these people then why can’t they just email them? At Vuuch we feel part of the answer is that with email you target individuals rather than a topic and then you push information you think they will want to know when you send the message. With a social approach you publish within a topic are (What Vuuch calls context) and those people who have an interest, when they have an interest, can find your point of view.
With Vuuch context or topics are defined by the deliverable the development team is working on. These are Component design (CAD files) and specifications like Word or Excel files… and Vuuch takes this one step deeper because first we don’t manage the file and we allow the users to associate to a feature of the CAD file, a word or words of a Word document and the cells within an Excel file. For example lets say a group of people are have a set of discussion between different selections within a CAD, Word and Excel file. The team could use the Vuuch WEB portal to navigate to these discussions either by the file type, discussion topic or those involved. Or if they wanted to see the ongoing discussions about the CAD file, then just open the CAD file and Vuuch will filter your discussions.
If content is king then context is the killer application.
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