All the successful companies long last, receiving respect and recognition have one unique trait: focusing on innovation and creativity. Innovation and creativity also means we will take the challenge, will change ourselves and think the solution out of box. Reengineering and continuously improving the function of each department as needed to stay competitive. The whole cycle is a self-evolution and it will create organic growth of the company.
The benefit of innovation is to allow a company can keep developing high performance products that the customers are willing to pay the premium. This will help on generating the high profit margin revenue pool. As the result, the company will have a healthier financial strength, provide better employee compensation, allocate appropriated funding to the next generation products and also pays higher dividends to the stockholders. In contrast, the companies compete based on cutting cost, production efficiency and manufacturing excellence but trade off innovation and quality will be difficult to keep itself competitive.
As the effect of globalization, most of the companies no longer keep manufacturing function at bay area anymore. The US based headquarter more or less just serves as a nerve center. Even the best talent staffs now can simply recruit from other cities without relocation (thanks the power and convenience of internet). In addition, the majority of manufacturing jobs are reallocated to the more cost effective cities or just outsourced to oversea OEM manufactures. This trend makes product development and project management more complicated than ever to deal with as the cross functional team members now can spread all over the world. Especially for a multi-function system level product development that involves numerous interactions of project management from inception of design down to operate stages. Work overtime and communicating with oversea staffs for driving the project forward, frequency of business travel and instability of job security due to the need of technology / product transfer are some of the negative impacts that the high tech project leader / coordinator needs to face off from time to time.
To me the most important factor to accomplish project is not how much budget can be spent but a good cohesion of teamwork to execute the project. As a project leader, he / she needs to ensure all the individual tasks will be executed in parallel, access the risk of system level integration failure, perform the corrective action for the improvement, and NOT afraid of requesting the extra support as needed so the final project will deliver on schedule. A well defined plan from the project leader will be a good foundation to complete the mission. Well plan ahead and clearly define the responsibly of each supporting group function definitely will further reduce the finger-pointing complains and unnecessary mistakes circulating around. The project leader should always give credit, appreciation and recognition to members make key contributions. This will make the members have a good sense of ownership, achievement and willing to work together as a team during the course of project.
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