Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 2

Upon the realization that my team and I have accidentally missed one test whilst completing the final test phase of the project, one must take on board a number of considerations before making any rash decisions about how to proceed.

The first consideration should be the impact from not completing the test, i.e., if the failure to carry out the test could result in a serious flaw of the semi-conductor to slip through into the market causing a public relations disaster for the company as well as recalls / fixes having to be implemented costing a great deal of money and a tarnished reputation, or if the fault would be almost non-existent and not effect.

With this in mind we can now look at the second consideration, where we look at how long it would take to carry out the test, how many staff would be involved (The phase is on the longest path of the Critical Path Method and thus could potentially remove staff for a long period from other important work), how far back it would set the project and if anything would need to be re-tested and/ or re gone after the test has been carried out. This could potentially cause both an economic issue and a legal one as it could cost additional expenditure (affecting the budget) and/ or the delivery date to be missed to customers which could be construed (in the worst case scenario) as a breach of contract.

The final consideration would be if this is a one-off fault, which can be easily rectified without halting the product line or if it would require shutting down the plant temporarily to rectify (economic impact and missing deadlines again).

In order to design a solution for this problem, a great deal of communication is required between both myself and my team and myself and my management. This way the implications (financial, legal and reputation) of letting the batch go to the end users without retesting can be weighed up against having to stop and delay the delivery of the semi-conductors to the end users whilst the batch is re-tested and checked. Through CPM, the dependencies, duration and details of the test can be investigated (with the help of the technician responsible as well as my own experience from working within this area) to ascertain how critical it is within the testing cycle as a whole.