Are all questions from students posted somewhere? Please let me know. I hope that I
can get a copy of it, and try to think of each question before I hear professor's answers.
- Yan Lu
Lecture 2 – Competing on Cost, Schedule, Quality
1. In the case where schedule, cost, and quality are all essential in a program (like
for the Space Shuttle), what kind of tradeoff analysis is done to determine the
area that will suffer the most? It seems like schedule would not have flexibility
because of the small window of opportunity to launch and quality would not have
flexibility because of the potential loss of human life. Can we assume that cost
suffers the most in this scenario?
- Ricardo Valerdi
2. In the Benefit Realization Approach (DMR/BRA) the assumptions are related to
the final outcome. If any assumptions are to be related to a project,shouldnt they
be related at the Initiative stage of the chain? It seems very odd to base the final
outcome of a project on an assumption.
- Asim Murad
3. In Lecture 2 "Competing on schedule, cost & quality" the professor states that
"building sloppy software is a bad investment". I can see how this would often
hold true, but if a company's product dominates the marketplace and desires to
get new releases to market as fast as possible, could this not overcome the
penalty (having the cost of fixing the product later) of not taking the time and cost
to test? An example that I am thinking of are the Microsoft Operating Systems
that require patches constantly but still are dominant in the marketplace.
- Karen Richardson
4. You state in Lecture 2 that it is important to be proactive in getting and clarifying
requirement. In my workplace often the domain experts that we rely upon to
generate requirements are extremely busy and unavailable for weeks. What is
the best way to handle this, in addition to letting stakeholders and the experts
