Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 2

Regardless of the output of critical path analysis, there will ultimately be only two decisions that result from the outcome of the proposed scenario. Missing tests that should be conducted upon produced silicon can either result in the decision being made to continue their production and release them anyway, or to halt the production so that the testing procedure may be repeated to include the missing tests.

Releasing the product and ignoring the missed tests can be considered a moral dilemma, for if the test was a highly important one, (governing the functionality of the product) releasing defective goods into the channel can be viewed as highly controversial. On the other hand, repeating the tests will breakdown the currently implemented development cycle and cause a large and costly delay upon production of not only the batch upon which the testing issue occurred, but also those following it on the production line.

Stage 6’s testing is defined as the stage where the detailed performance characteristics of each individual micro-processor are established. This stage is a pre-requisite to stage 7’s process of configuring the micro-processors to operate at their given speeds, which then governs which platform they are then destined for (laptop, desktop or server). Without having completed the testing correctly, the micro-processors could all be labelled as a lower speed across the board, thus saving any re-testing but still permitting them to be released without incident – as it is more likely that all would function correctly at a lower tolerance. This approach would still lose money however on the basis that not all the designated platforms would receive the products they require and so deliveries to customers would be delayed.

Ultimately, any course of action will end up leaving Intel with a loss of revenue and thus from the supervising engineers point of view – the best course of action would be to suggest viable approaches to reducing this loss as much as possible. Therefore releasing anyway and labelling the products as slower fulfilling only the mobile and desktop categories and not the faster server category seems like the most sensible course of action.