I worked for quite a few leading analog and digital ICs companies in the past 15 years, from a start up with size of 50 staffs up to a well-established corporate with thousands of employees. My expertise is on IC reliability and failure analysis in semiconductor industry.
Currently I work for Linear Technology Corp and lead a reliability engineering team. The major job responsibility includes generating qualification test plan, providing the test solution to meet customer or specific industry requirements and delivering all reliability test result so the product can be released to the production stage in time. The most complicated part of the job is not taking care of over 50 well-defined qualification routines & reporting the weekly status but to develop unique reliability test system solutions that meets the specific requirements from time to time. This kind of developing task is more complicated due to no example to follow and at the inception stage only having one or two pages of document spec to reference. How to leverage the possessed resources, authority and get support from other cross-functional groups also is not an easy task either. The higher management involvement is always needed. Furthermore, the perception of management believes that a project leader gets the assignment should be the most capable and knowledgeable one to accomplish the project without much issues, therefore no need to add any staffs but just spending very little budget & using his/her "creative thinking" to deliver the result (what an honor). This in general just make the project even more complicated to accomplish.
Dealing with the project assignment is always challenging and stressful. Hopefully I can learn the arts on dealing with the project more effectively and efficiently from the class.
v interesting position and it Seems like you have already done many many projects. Is it hard to manage a team? Do you always work with same team members? How do you handle low performance team member?
ReplyDeleteThe project team members are not always the same, it depend on the project assignment.
ReplyDeleteOne of critical factors for a successful project is the leader needs to have a very clear idea about what he/she want to achieve (i.e., you just want to meet the basic spec requirement or want to provide extra features?). Thinking / defining project scope process can thru the group brainstorming and get all the team members inputs. So everyone will have idea about how simple / complicated the project will be. You can digest all the inputs and do a bit more research to make the plan more feasible to execute (it’s also the time to check how much budget you can get and make a project spending proposal to your boss).
Next is to break the project to the executable function that you believe each individual group can accomplish in parallel. To me a project leader it’s also better to be a system level integrator, he/she need to know how to integrate all the pieces of individual functions and deliver the project as a whole.
If certain function get delay unexpected due to poor collaboration, it’s better understand delay is due to the supporting staff get new assignment that supersede yours or any other reasons behind. If you sense the delay / result cannot be accepted, escalate the situation to the associated managers and inform your manager/director ASAP, copy to the highest level of management that care about the project delivery status so all the associated members are fully aware of the whole situation (better in written). In the mean time host another meeting for reviewing the project status and ask the associated manager to attend the meeting. Most of the time case will solve and move forward.