By Jennifer Herron This weekend I read ASME’s Mechanical Engineering magazine issue No. 01/143. They published a survey regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on engineering businesses. The results are relevant to Action Engineering’s business operations over this year. So many of you have asked how we are doing; it’s always nice to know our […]
Agile Mindset: Balancing Workloads
Developing the MBD processes is a cross-functional and multi-disciplinary project that requires participation from a lot of folks, but not always at the same level of involvement each sprint. What if dev team members don’t have any work in a sprint? How do we keep them in the loop? Not all team members have work […]
Agile Mindset: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing
Bruce Tuckman proposed the “forming-storming-norming-performing” model of group development back in the 1960s. Tuckman stated that all of these phases are necessary and ultimately inevitable if a team wishes to grow, be able to face headwinds, creatively develop solutions, and deliver results. Each time a team member leaves a team or a new member joins […]
CAD Interoperability and the OSCAR CAD Toolkit
In most cases, a “Model-Based Enterprise” is going to include multiple CAD platforms. You could be a large corporation that uses multiple CAD applications or a smaller company that only uses one but has suppliers that use other CAD platforms. This reality means CAD interoperability challenges cannot be ignored. While each CAD system has strengths and weaknesses, the big five are capable of: modeling geometry, creating 3D annotations, defining attributes (metadata), and creating “presentation states.” We […]
Agile Mindset: Research Spikes
Have you ever been humming along in a sprint, and then someone throws out a bombshell question such as “how does one boil the ocean?” While this is a very valid question, it’s going to take more than a two-week sprint to answer this. There are so many uncertainties and unknowns that need to be […]
Agile Mindset: When Agile Isn’t the Answer (to Baking Pumpkin Bread)
For a newsletter dedicated to educating about various Agile topics, it feels counterintuitive to write about how Agile isn’t always the answer. But as with most things in life, there is not always a one-size-fits-all approach to running a project. Imagine you want to bake the most delicious loaf of pumpkin bread for the community […]
Agile Mindset: Managing the Product Backlog
Have you ever heard a team member grumbling about the sprint planning meeting not being productive because there is nothing in the backlog? Or maybe you’ve thought this yourself! If this is the case, the Product Owner might need a refresher on the workflow and delivery cadence. You want to start working on and refining […]
Jennifer Talks “Agile Chaos” with Project Brilliant
Jennifer Herron joins Aaron Kopel, Project Brilliant CEO, to talk about Agile in times of chaos. Agility can be elusive. Project Brilliant provides the clarity. Project Brilliant challenges organizations to transcend traditional practices—garnering longer-term stability, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.