Management & Project Management

 We believe in the importance of management.  In fact, in this age of intentional chaos and mismanagement, we believe all the more in management.  But the right management ...

We do NOT believe in “management by walking around” (here is the worse case scenario).  Rather the job of management is to actually know the employees and task them with challenges equal to the abilities of the workers.

We believe that hiring is the most important job of management.  Many companies say that their most valuable asset is their employees, but then hire those that might only be considered “B-players”.  Also, it is not unknown for someone with a great “resume” not to perform to his or her potential.  In both cases, it takes time for management to notice this poor performance and to take action.

We believe in (most) of “the 12 Agile principles” and (most) of what the “Lean StartUp” by Eric Ries teaches.  These ideas have to be understood in the context of hardware development, which has some real differences to software development only.

A few words about Project Management.  There are a number of different “styles” of project management, including:

1.    The traditional PMBOK from the Project Management Institute (aka “Waterfall”).
2.    Agile project management approaches.
3.    Lean project management approaches.

There are many variations and hybrids of these various project management styles.  Of the last two approaches, “agile” is used almost universally for software, while “waterfall” and “lean” are used for hardware development.  There are real differences in the project management of a software-only project and a hardware project, mostly to do with the long turn times of hardware prototyping and the deep task relations of hardware.

 
Molten-Labs has chosen a variation of the “agile” project management strategy for our project management strategy.