In the first part of this series, I emphasized that the China-speed gap is caused by the OEM-supplier integration “tax,” and that the answer is to bridge this gap within a defined DMZ (figuratively “demilitarized zone”) for the duration of a single program rather than acquiring the supplier or using constructs such as joint ventures. That was the why. This article is the how, or at least the first half of it. Read…
In every distressed safety-critical program I have walked into over the decades, there is a moment of genuine insight. I sit down with the senior engineers and project leads—the people who actually know how the system works—and within twenty minutes, they tell me exactly what is wrong with the project and exactly what would fix it. Read…
A guy I knew years ago was the best guitarist in his small town. Local gigs, people actually came to see him. He was charismatic and really good at his self-taught double-hand tapping. Then he Read…
When BYD ships a new platform faster than its legacy competitors can complete a single ECU change request, the legacy OEMs struggle to explain why. The excuses are manifold, including cheaper labor, government subsidies, and lower safety standards. Read…
The Foundation for Transparent Tracking in MtO Projects W. Edwards Deming once stated: “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” In most distressed projects I have worked with, the problem is not that Read…
In a distressed MtO project, the feature burndown shows whether the team is closing scope gaps. But there is a second dimension that the burndown does not capture: product quality. Features can be declared “done” while carrying unresolved defects that compound across releases and eventually lead to ugly customer escalations—or worse: field failures. That can result in shipping broken products—not because the team hasn’t worked hard on developing new features, but because product quality hasn’t been managed early on. Read…
Made-to-Order (MtO) projects are fundamentally different from R&D. A customer defines the requirements. The scope is contractually fixed. The lifecycle follows a V-model (at least in regulatory-relevant projects) with formal verification at every level of Read…
Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said we might be “6–12 months away from models doing all of what software engineers do end-to-end.” Read…
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