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Top line Project Reporting – Bottom Lie Project Management

Top line Project Reporting – Bottom Lie Project Management

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Projects are about businesses and business is about money.  Very few firms are not-for-profit and profit margins are fundamental to ensuring a company’s survival in the dog-eat-dog world of the markets they operate in.  Profit declaration is an essential part any company’s annual report and a quick, but not necessarily accurate indicator of its financial health.

According to the microeconomic ‘Theory of the Firm’ companies exist to maximize net profits and all decisions must bear this in mind. But profit margins are based upon forecasts and assumptions until a final account is determined.  It’s only then that the grim reality of undeniable and irreversible losses is seen or the comfort any balance hasn’t slipped into the red, or the euphoria that predetermined margins have been maintained or even exceeded!

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Technical Facilitators: Helpful Tips and Insights on How to Ask Better Questions

Technical Facilitators: Helpful Tips and Insights on How to Ask Better Questions

The four-part series of communication tips on “How to Ask Better Questions.”  The primary audience is technical professionals who serve as facilitators of team collaboration. However, the approaches and techniques apply to just about anyone. This series summary of helpful tips and insight, including a brief description and a link to each article.

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Steps to Performing an Effective Root Cause Analysis

Steps to Performing an Effective Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process for identifying the underlying causes of problems and preventing their recurrence. An effective RCA not only resolves the current issue but also provides insights for improving processes and systems. This comprehensive guide explores the detailed steps involved in performing an expert-level RCA.
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The Fear of Reliability

The Fear of Reliability

MTBF is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is possibly a lack of interest in reliability. Which I doubt is the case. Or it is a bit of fear of reliability.

Many shy away from the statistics involved. Some simply do not want to know the currently unknown. It could be the fear of potential bad news that the design isn’t reliable enough. Some do not care to know about problems that will require solving.

Whatever the source of the uneasiness, you may know one or more coworkers who would rather not deal with reliability in any direct manner.
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How to Create Performance Curves from the IMS

How to Create Performance Curves from the IMS

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Two schedule tools are widely used for the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS )around the world to manage projects. The first one is Microsoft Project (MS Project). The second one is Primavera P6.  They are both very good. Primavera P6 is an Oracle product originally designed for the construction industry. MS Project is simpler and easier to learn based on my experience. It also costs less than Primavera P6. DOD uses MS Project and typically requires it for use on government contracts. Other industries use one or the other depending on the size and complexity of the project.

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How Maintenance Contributes to Financial Performance

How Maintenance Contributes to Financial Performance

Industrial operations that use physical assets for production or service delivery need their assets to run optimally, and cause minimal operational disruptions when they don’t. Spending too little overall, or on doing the wrong things, always backfires. These short-term savings inevitably lead to breakdowns disrupting operations that cost much more in lost revenue than was saved by under-spending.

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Equipment Failure Prevention Needs Defect Elimination Strategy

Equipment Failure Prevention Needs Defect Elimination Strategy

To reduce maintenance costs and production downtime it is necessary to reduce the causes of the maintenance and downtime.  Both maintenance and downtime are an effect and not a cause.  The causes can be traced back to defects and errors from a variety of sources.  Knowing that defects eventually lead to future equipment failures, production downtime and lost profits, it is necessary put strategies into place to purposely prevent them occurring in the first place and to eliminate them if they are present.

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Systems/Validation Engineering (Part 2)

Systems/Validation Engineering (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this article series, we described validation engineering as the process of validating, monitoring and execution of product requirements to ensure customer needs are met.  The validation engineer is the validation process owner and works with subject matter experts to develop complete, accurate and testable requirements.

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Multiple-Failure-Mode Reliability Estimation

Multiple-Failure-Mode Reliability Estimation

“It is the policy of my Administration to respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic through effective approaches guided by the best available science and data” [Biden Executive order, 2021]. That epidemic inspired the simultaneous nonparametric estimation of survival functions from case to recovery and case to death, without lifetime data (figure 1)!

Why not do the same for multiple-failure-mode data? This article shows nonparametric, multiple-failure-mode, maximum likelihood reliability estimation in a spreadsheet. Data are system first-failure times and the corresponding failure modes that caused the first system failures (table 1). However those data are dependent. I will explain the likelihood function, lnL, and how to find the maximum likelihood reliability estimates for all failure modes simultaneously.

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Hypothesis Testing Part-5: Chi-Square Test of One Variance

Hypothesis Testing Part-5: Chi-Square Test of One Variance

Dear friends, we are happy to released this fifth video in our series on Hypothesis Testing! In this video, Hemant Urdhwareshe explains the applicability of Chi-square test of one variance with an illustration! Hemant is Fellow of ASQ and is one of the few Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belts from ASQ having six certifications from ASQ.

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