Technical Management Processes Flashcards
What processes are included within technical management processes?
It includes project planning, project assessment and control, decision management, risk management, configuration management, information management, measurement, and quality assurance.
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What is the purpose of the Project Planning process?
To produce and coordinate effective and workable plans.
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What is SEMP?
The SEMP is the top-level plan for managing the SE effort. It defines how the project will be organized, structured, and conducted and how the total engineering process will be controlled to provide a product that satisfies stakeholder requirements.
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When shall the SEMP be prepared?
A SEMP should be prepared early in the project, submitted to the customer (or to management for in-house projects), and used in technical management for the concept and development stages of the project or the equivalent in commercial practice.
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Who will be involved in the creation of the SEMP?
Participants in the creation of the SEMP should include senior systems engineers, representative subject matter experts, project management, and often the customer.
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What is the purpose of the Project Assessment and Control process?
To assess if the plans are aligned and feasible; determine the status of the project, technical and process performance; and direct execution to ensure that the performance is according to plans and schedules, within projected budgets, to satisfy technical objectives.
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Which process does inputs “WBS” “project budget” and “project schedule” of 5.2 come from?
All come from 5.1 project planning process.
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Is it always true that “what gets measured gets done”?
No, projects should avoid the collection of measures that are not used in decision making.
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What is the purpose of the Decision Management process?
To provide a structured, analytical framework for objectively identifying, characterizing and evaluating a set of alternatives for a decision at any point in the life cycle and select the most beneficial course of action.
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What decision situations (opportunities) that are commonly encountered in development stage?
Select system architecture, system element, lower-level elements, test and evaluation methods.
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5.3 can be executed by a resourced decision team, could you please think of people needs to be involved in such team?
A decision maker with full responsibility, authority, and accountability for the decision at hand, a decision analyst with a suite of reasoning tools, subject matter experts with performance models, and a representative set of end users and other stakeholders.
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What are the common analytical approach used by systems engineers?
Decision tree, MODA, trade study.
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What are the three assessments the subject matter expert can make to assess an upper, nominal, and lower bound measure response?
- Assuming a low performance,
- Assuming moderate performance,
- Assuming high performance.
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What is the purpose of the Risk Management process?
To identify, analyze, treat and monitor the risks continually.
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What are the definitions of “risk” and “opportunity” defined by E.H. Conrow?
Traditionally, risk has been defined as the likelihood of an event occurring coupled with a negative consequence of the event occurring. Opportunity is the potential for the realization of wanted, positive consequences of an event.
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Is it possible to reduce risks down to zero if risk management is well performed?
No, risk cannot be reduced to zero, but to achieve a proper balance between risk and opportunity.
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What are the typical strategies for coping with risk?
Transference, avoidance, acceptance, or taking action to reduce the anticipated negative effects of the situation.
What are the two components of the measurement of risk?
- The likelihood that an event will occur
- The undesirable consequence of the event if it does occur
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What are the four categories of the risk?
Technical risk, cost risk, schedule risk and programmatic risk
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What are the three key risk management process activities once a risk management strategy and risk profile have been established?
Analyze risks, treat risks, and monitor risks
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Give some examples of risk assessment techniques.
Brainstorming, checklists, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), Monte Carlo simulation, and Bayesian statistics and Bayes nets.
What the four basic approaches to treat risk?
- Avoid the risk through change of requirements or redesign;
- Accept the risk and do no more;
- Control the risk by expending budget and other resources to reduce likelihood and/or consequence;
- Transfer the risk by agreement with another party that it is in their scope to mitigate. Look for a partner that has experience in the dedicated risk area.
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What steps can be we take to avoid or control unnecessary risks?
Requirements scrubbing, selection of most promising options, staffing and team building.
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Risk avoidance is insufficient for high-risk technical tasks, what supplemented approaches can we take?
- Early procurement;
- Initiation of parallel developments;
- Implementation of extensive analysis and testing;
- Contingency planning
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What are the two levels of risks and opportunities?
- The macro level is the project opportunity itself as a project is the pursuit of an opportunity.
- The element level encompasses the tactical opportunities and risks within the project
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What is the purpose of the Configuration Management process?
To manage and control system elements and configurations over the life cycle. It also manages consistency between a product and its associated configuration definition.
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What is the fundamental to the objective of configuration management?
It is the establishment, control, and maintenance of software and hardware baselines. Baselines are business, budget, functional, performance, and physical reference points for maintaining development and control.
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What are the baseline changes throughout the system life cycle?
This includes the identification, recording, review, approval, tracking, and processing of requests for change (RFCs) and requests for variance (RFVs) (also known as deviations).
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Generally, how many major types of baselines at the system level and what are they?
Three: functional baseline, allocated baseline, and product baseline.
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What are the most desirable outcomes of an ECP cycle?
- System functionality is altered to meet a changing requirement;
- New technology or a new product extends the capabilities of the system beyond those initially required in ways that the customer desires;
- The costs of development, or of utilization, or of support are reduced;
- The reliability and availability of the system are improved.
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What are the primary focus of configuration management?
Configuration identification, configuration control, configuration status accounting, and configuration audits of the functional and physical configuration (i.e., validation and distribution).
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Changes can sometimes be categorized into how many classes and what are they?
Changes are sometimes categorized into two main classes: Class I and Class II. A Class I change is a major or significant changes that affects cost, schedule, or technical performance. Normally, it requires customer approval prior to being implemented. A Class II change is a minor change that often affects documentation errors or internal design details, it generally doesn’t require customer approval.
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What forms provide an organized approach to changing hardware, software, or documentation?
Problem/change reports, specification change notice (SCN), ECPs, ECRs, request for deviation/waiver.
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What is the purpose of the Information Management process?
To generate, obtain, confirm, transform, retain, retrieve, disseminate and dispose of information, to designated stakeholder.
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What are information assets and please give some examples.
Information assets are intangible information and any tangible forms of its representation, including drawings, memos, email, computer files, and database.
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What is the purpose fo the Measurement process?
To collect, analyze, and report objective data and information to support effective management and demonstrate the quality of the products, services, and processes.
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What is the value of measurement?
The value in measurement comes not from the act of measurement but rather from the eventual analysis of the data and the implementation of action to either correct a variance from a target value or to improve current performance to a more desirable level.
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What are the three categories of organization goals?
Cost (development), schedule (development), quality (process)
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What are examples of leading indicator measures?
Requirements trends, interface trends, requirements validation trends
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What is the purpose of the Quality Assurance process?
To help ensure the effective application of the organization’s Quality Management process to the project.
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How to verify whether QA activities are effective?
Analyze statistics from process audits, verification results, product discrepancy reports, customer satisfaction monitoring, and accident and incident reporting to verify whether QA activities are effective.
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What are the common QA techniques?
Checklist, quality audit, root cause analysis.
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