Page 209 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

196 THE ART OF DESIGNING EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

A classic complaint at the end of any project is that creeping fea-
turism inflated the spec. The post mortem must address this, in a quanti-
tative way. No: “Marketing kept changing the specs” may be accurate,
but leaves a manager no specific information useful to the next project.
Better: “Four spec changes, with a total impact of 23 additional devel-
opment days, accounted for 60% of the schedule slip. All changes made
sense in terms of the goals. Unhappily, management forgot the impact
and kept the same schedule. Next time get their approval in writing for
the slip.”
The goal is not to find failure, but to find answers. Successes are
every bit as important to understand, so you can capitalize on them next
time.
No one person is smart enough to find solutions to all problems. The
document should be input to a brainstorming meeting where your col-
leagues hash out better ways to perform next time. Feed these ideas, where
appropriate, back into the document.
The only bad postmortem is one that’s not honest and thoughtful. Do
assess yourselves without beating each other up-no matter how badly
things went. But be intolerant of flippant, whiny, or unreflective post
mortems. If a team member is unable or unwilling to look for ways to im-
prove the organization, especially in this nonthreatening context, then that
person is simply not suited to a career in this fast-changing industry. At
least not with me.
A post mortem without specific quantifiable data is a waste of time.
“Well, we ran somewhat late and were over budget” is useless informa-
tion. “We finished early and saved a ton of money” is just as bad. You
can’t take action, or learn things, without knowing the specifics of the
situation.
But our memories are notoriously unreliable. During a six-month
project lots of things happen, good and bad. Many dates might be missed
and many met. By the time you’re analyzing the results of the project,
there’s no way you’ll remember-accurately-even a few of these.
Preserve the data, so during the post mortem you’ll have the accurate
information you need to produce useful recommendations. The engineer-
ing notebook, which I’ve endorsed throughout this book, is a logical place
to record all of this information.
Too many people feel that college is the end of education. It’s just the
start. We’ve all got to struggle forever to learn more and to improve. Read-
ing, studying, seminars, trade shows are all important ingredients. Equally
important is self- and organizational examination, looking for good things
to emulate and bad things to fix.