Project-coordination tools: Get your act together before you take it on the road

Engineering the design of products isn't what it used to be, whatever that was. Today's engineers are working in small and large teams; across the corridor and around the world; doing coordinated electronic and mechanical design; and using standard, semi-custom, and custom parts. And they are generating complex documentation so that product parts can be procured and the shippable products assembled in-house or by contract houses. Samuel Beckett said, "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now" (Reference 1). In many ways, engineers and project managers must be artists, adding structure to an inherently messy process that is riddled with both expected and unexpected problems. The lone engineer, aided by a technician, is a rarity in product development.

Despite the fact that products have become smaller, their internal complexity has grown tremendously. Even with large-scale ICs, products often contain 50 or 100 distinct electronic and mechanical components. Sizes and tolerances are extremely tight, any component change causes major design ripples, and co-design of circuitry, software, and mechanical components means that no engineer is functioning as a solo practitioner. Trying to keep everyone on the team informed, following procedure, and using the latest revisions of anything is a challenge. Making sure that the detailed documentation as well as the higher level specifications correctly capture changes in the actual implementation is also a challenge.

Fortunately, new and sophisticated tools can help you and your team. They can take care of both big-picture issues and small details while managing documentation and tracking resources and revisions. However, at the same time, they can cause their own set of new problems. The wide array of project-coordination tools on the market means you have to consider your priorities and problems before you sign on the dotted line.

In The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot wrote, "There will be time...for a hundred visions and revisions." Revisions are inevitable in engineering design. Among their many causes are changing requirements, system-design problems, coding bugs, unavailable components, and packaging issues. And, although revisions are inevitable and sometimes welcome, they also are a source of confusion. Revisions cause further errors due to miscommunication among team members, when everyone is not using the same music score.

Before you start shopping for the software tools that will assist your project coordination, you have to face one simple fact: No single tool on the market will solve all of your problems. Such a tool, if it existed, would probably be hard to use, complex, and costly. Obviously, the tools you need to coordinate the design of assembled products—which have a bill of materials, assembly drawings, and outside vendors that supply many of the components—are different from the EDA tools you need for an IC design.

If you decide to investigate tools for project coordination, you face two initial challenges. First, you have to think carefully about your priorities and what you are hoping to accomplish. Second, you must become familiar with new meanings for words, different words and phrases that mean the same thing, and words or phrases that have different meanings, depending on the source. Data sheets and marketing-driven demo packages, which rely on the simplistic usage and repetition of terms and clichés by vendors, can blur or obscure what their products actually will do for your application.

A few examples make this problem vivid. You'll confront layers of words, such as "complete," "enterprise," "solution," "cross-functional," and "integrated," as well as acronyms such as PDM (product-data management), MRP (materials-requirements planning), DCM (design-chain management), and SCM (supply-chain management). To add to your challenge, some vendor literature implies that because that vendor's product is Internet-based or Web-centric, it will magically solve your presumed problem. Although integration with the Internet is often a key element of a good project-coordination package, by itself that attribute cannot save the day.

Note that PDM is a broad but important concept. A complete PDM system allows you to post, route, and track all documents, such as component and assembly drawings and bills of materials. It also supports searches for specific data, such as part and revision numbers, designers' names, and release dates. Further, it allows you to check out and check in documents and notify team members of changes to a relevant design document. Unless your project is software-only, these features may be important to successful delivery of a shippable, assembled product.

Among the issues you may want your project-coordination tools to address are:

• laying out and tracking project schedules and allocation of resources;
• groups of as many as 10 people working on hardware and software co-design;
• groups of hundreds working on the product;
• third-party suppliers of software and design services;
• access to small or large files by users in different locations;
• integration of the electronic design with mechanical design;
• bills of materials, component selection, approved vendors, and purchasing input;
• documentation-revision tracking;
• bug reporting and tracking for designs in progress;
• high-level documentation and planning, flowing down to detailed engineering software and hardware design, and vice versa;
• serial or parallel access to working files and documents; and
• generation of archival documentation for user manuals or long-term support.

You must decide which of the above factors are most important to your project and then try to match available tools to your "must haves." Look at areas where your team has had past problems or where its working style may no longer suit the realities of the next project's increased complexities or aggressive timetable. If scheduling and resource allocation are your biggest concerns, a basic PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique)- or Gantt-chart application may be all you need (see sidebar "Sometimes, simple is the way to start").

Also, realize that project-coordination and -management tools range from those that specifically target electronics projects and their needs to more general tools that you can adapt to a variety of engineering projects. You may find that more general tools lack some features you really need or, conversely, that more general tools encompass broader issues than your team needs to deal with.

For real-time embedded-application development, I-Logix offers the Rhapsody 4.0 development platform, which supports UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams and a test-generation suite (Figure 1). The program combines front-end analysis and system design with back-end implementation and testing. Changes to the higher level planning ripple down to the lower level coding, and changes at the coding level automatically ripple back up to the higher level planning. As a result, your documentation is automatically correct, regardless of where and when you make the inevitable changes.

The Rhapsody system also recognizes that many projects are now large-team activities. For these situations, it supports both flat and hierarchical design repositories. It also lets you store design elements in single- or multiple-configuration archives, so you can more easily partition and organize UML designs. Further, it lets users load only necessary parts of a larger design, activate only those parts of interest, recognize what has changed in a design, and save only the changes. These features save data-transfer time and increase the potential efficiency of individual developers on large projects.

Somewhat similar to Rhapsody is Rational Rose Realtime from Rational Software Corp (Figure 2). This tool extends the visual-modeling Rational Rose tool with UML model-code generation and visualization. It lets you reverse-engineer your system to build on that base, develop algorithms, generate code, and execute on the host or a target platform. Linking design concepts with code gives you a better chance of retaining the initial or up-front design requirements that team members must implement.

If your design-management effort centers on mechanical-design issues, a product such as EnCapta from Vistagy Inc may be a good choice (Figure 3). Vistagy targets three aspects of the design collaboration: standard geometric CAD software, PDM-system information about components and assemblies, and the specialized process-related information and engineering notes that often make the difference between a successful product release and a painful one. For example, EnCapta software would carry additional notes on surface plating, heat treating, and part finish, and the effect of these factors on the part and design, along with information about the parts and overall design.

For design efforts in which collaboration among dispersed team members is a key stumbling block, eReview from Web4 Inc is a tool to consider. This view-and-markup package lets your team hold meetings over the Internet while viewing and annotating documents, drawings, and CAD files in more than 150 standard formats. With eReview, you can use a stand-alone mode, in which a single user, at his or her own pace, can view and mark up documents; a collaborative mode, in which a team works together to perform the same functions; and a roaming mode, a combination of the stand-alone and collaborative modes, in which team members work on their own and then share comments.

All the comments, markups, and annotations are nondestructive; instead, they are saved in a corollary file that also provides historical tracking. The chairperson of the meeting can set privilege levels for each participant, allowing some to only view and others to view and annotate. If some of the data is confidential, you can also block portions from some of the attendees. This feature is useful if your collaboration includes outside suppliers.

Although a bill of materials may seem to be a straightforward document that directs purchasing efforts and guides assembly plans, it is not. Recognizing this fact, BOM.com offers an Internet-service-based product (Figure 4). Subscribers to BOM.com receive access to a relational database that manages the often-complex and -confusing relationship among part names, part numbers, manufacturers, suppliers, prices, leadtimes, part CAD files, and status of parts. The software works with some of the standard CAD-modeling programs to link the bill of materials and the design. This link makes the bill of materials a more integrated part of the design—and inevitable design changes—than a simpler spreadsheet-based bill of materials.

For large teams of several hundred to several thousand engineers, Crosspoint from Intersect Software combines attributes of PERT charts and collaboration software. The software tracks instructions to team members, personnel reassignments, team resources, work assignments, and team relationships. It also recognizes the unavoidable fact that team members may leave the company. It associates instructions with both the name of the team member and the member's role, so roles can be reassigned as necessary.

For applications whose design team is widely dispersed—often with some members on a wide-area network and without high-speed Internet access—Adept from Synergis Technologies Inc is designed to speed the downloading and management of large, usually CAD-centric files while ensuring that you don't lose or overwrite files when you provide remote access via your local server. The software manages access to documents, including check-out and check-in, but system administrators can have direct access. And they may need this access for file maintenance and archiving. If a file is already in use, Adept notifies anyone else who wants access to it and lets the requester know who has the file and when it was checked out. It also manages any files associated with the one that is checked out, so that referenced documentation is properly tracked.

Regardless of the tools you need, you probably also need to be involved in procurement of parts for that project. Although this responsibility has traditionally not belonged to the design team, the complexity of today's overall cycle of design and manufacturing mandates that the design team be more involved in this aspect of the shippable product. In a phrase, DCM is overlapping SCM. Fortunately, two major developments have made this task easier: Component marketplace middlemen, such as ChipData, iSuppli, and PartMiner, are working with both your bill-of-materials and supplier sources to match available parts and sources, and the RosettaNet nonprofit consortium is developing and implementing standard component-specification formats to compare and contrast parts (see sidebar "A rose is a rose is a rose, but resistors are different").

Author Information

Executive Editor Bill Schweber marvels at the complexity of today's electronic products yet often thinks about how early engineers accomplished what they did without today's tools. You can reach Bill Schweber at 1-617-558-4484 or e-mail at bill.schweber@cahners.com.