Hardware Project Planning Survey: Full Results

After some of our own analysis, it’s time to turn the conversation over to you! Here are all the data from our 2012 hardware project planning survey.

To quickly rehash what you’re looking at, this survey was conducted by Catherine Louis and I last year. The intention was to get a feel for how successful hardware teams have been with their current approaches to project planning. As you’ll see, we had people respond from all areas of hardware development from all levels. We’ve found the results to be quite interesting.

If you want a little more background, Planning to Fail in Hardware Development is a good place to start. In there you’ll find a link to our initial analysis posted on eetimes. Other articles we’ve posted since:

But enough talk from me. Since you’re here to see data, here it is!

-neil Continue reading

Planning to Fail: Long Hours, Mounting Stress and Aggressive Goal Setting

Thus far, we’ve seen numbers related to confidence in project planning and our failure to produce accurate project estimates. In this post, we’ll see that failing to meet project delivery dates doesn’t come from lack of effort, though we will see another sign that we’re indeed setting ourselves up for failure. Here’s three new data points from our project planning survey related to long hours, mounting stress and aggressive goal setting. Continue reading

Planning to Fail: Is Estimating Really This Difficult?

Estimating effort is something we collectively struggle with in hardware development considering building the project plan is an exercise that everyone is involved in. Here’s the next few data points from our project planning survey that may have you wondering why we’re so wrong when it comes to estimating and project planning. Continue reading

Guest Blog: Variance in Project Plans from Start to Finish

We’ve had our first brave sole step up and offer his opinion based on data from our project planning survey! Our guest contributor is Gaurav Jalan, a design verification engineer with services firm SmartPlay in Bangalore. Gaurav, who runs his own blog focused on hardware verification, offers his opinion on variance in project plans.

Take it away Gaurav! Continue reading

Planning to Fail in Hardware Development

Screen Shot 2013-02-01 at 12.44.55 PMYes… you’re reading the title right! Seems we hardware developers spend more of our time planning for failure than we do for success!

How, you might be asking yourself, could I make such an outlandish claim?

Well, Catherine Louis and I have started analyzing data from the project planning survey we did last year and the data appear to support that conclusion. The results aren’t pretty, but they certainly are interesting :)!

Last week we began sharing our analysis in an EETimes article called Planning to Fail is Planning to Fail. In that article, we look at the first few data points that we found most telling. One that sticks out to us is that 87% of the people polled see their projects finishing behind schedule; another is that only half of respondents are confident in their approach to project planning. There’s other data in there that we think is compelling enough to support the idea hardware developers are stuck in a rut that ends in failure relative to what they plan for. Continue reading