About Jaguar Project

In 2001, the company started planning of Jaguar, a completely new tester platform
intended to create a new system architecture that would form the basis of one of
Teradynes major product lines for the next decade.
The project was envisioned as a culmination of sorts in Teradynes 8 year effort to
improve product development process
In 2001 O Brien, a 25 year veteran of Teradynes engineering organization is
appointed as project leader
The Company decided to abolish the markets-segment-focused platform into a
single platform engineering group
Teradyne senior management made a pivotal strategic decision to embrace a
flexible platform strategy
Main emphasis was to use project management tools to streamline the product
development
activities
Project Management Tools and Processes Used
Teradynes Traditional Project Execution Strategy Planning Projects were poorly
planned. The goals and scope were often not clearly defined; Milestones were not
well defined, and were often missed . It was against Teradynes culture to mandate
the use of any specific tools, it was left up to individual divisions and managers to
decide which recommendations to follow. Some divisions of the company quickly
embraced the approach, while others seemed to resist or simply ignore them.
Jaguar Project Execution Requirements & scope are very clearly defined. Delivery
date is also finalized and adding scopes during development was not allowed
Formalized project management tools like Work Breakdown structure, 3-point
estimation,
Critical
Path
analysis,
Earned
value
analysis
are
used.
Data were generally not available until after a major phase review but by this point
it could have been too late to take corrective action. Even within divisions, progress
was highly variable.
The leaders of project teams and senior management often did not have very timely
information on how a project was tracking relatively to schedule The company were
badly overcommitted on projects; capacity utilization was estimated to be as high
as 300%.