Planning
Development time
- Design and production time for Open Hardware designs (2013)
(pdf,
.xlsx)
- Conclusions (spoiler alert!)
- V1 is not (i.e. never!) suitable for series production. Designs need usually two to four versions before being production ready.
- Highly resourced projects take two years from design start to series production. Others need almost three years.
- When components are provided by CERN, it usually still takes a company one year to produce a series. Pre-series are needed.
- Conclusions (spoiler alert!)
Task planning
In 2017 CERN's Open Hardware team started to use a method where teams of
three to four people (hardware and software engineers) work together on
a single task, aiming to finish selected tasks faster, sharing knowledge
and having more fun. Those tasks are supposed to take two to three
months to finish. With the current size of the section (10-15 people) we
can handle three of those tasks concurrently. Everyone is supposed to
work at least 50% on these selected tasks, while the remaining time is
available for so-called background tasks.
A Kanban board is used to keep track of the progress, while weekly
meetings with everyone present are held.
Method used by CERN's Open Hardware team that has been used from 2013 to 2016:
- Task planning template
(pdf,
docx)
- Explains the method used by CERN's Open Hardware team to organize the workload on a weekly basis.
- This method has proven to work great, notably when engineers mostly work on their own tasks.
- This method guarantees that also low-priority, non-urgent tasks are tracked and kept visible.
- This method guarantees weekly one-on-one time between single engineers and planning/quality officer.
Examples of project planning Gantt charts
- Price Enquiry, Pre-series, Production
(pdf,
mpp)
- Minimal 8 months from Price Enquiry sent out until reception of series production (experience shows it's often longer, see above).
Erik van der Bij - 25 January 2017