Segway Case

Segway had a very unique way to Identify, define, combine and coordinate its various processes and project management activities.

- To bring the Segway HT to life, a new company was established, and key outside suppliers, which would play an integral role throughout the development process, were brought on board. (Prochain - 1st para)

- The approach that Product Development chose to manage the execution phase was a hybrid in which an agile development methodology was used to manage the content of an iteration, and a critical chain scheduling (CCS) approach was used to manage how the iterations rolled up into the overall implementation.(prochain - critical chain)

- A critical chain schedule is a plan that is governed by the longest set of dependent activities. These activities are specified at their lowest level of complexity -- the task. (prochain - Critical Chain)

(prochain - Agile methodologies)

- In an agile effort, the project is seen as belonging to the customer. Most customers know precisely what they want but have difficulty expressing it to the team responsible for execution.

- Segway determined that the machine would not be marketed until the product was ready. This detail is extremely important in utilizing CCS, as the project network (rather than schedule) is created backwards from the endpoint and allows the schedulers to ask the question: "In order to get to this, what needs to be done first?" Thus it builds the schedule from the top down.

(prochain - hybrid)

- Creating the project network with a sufficient degree of detail is a large effort for even small well defined jobs, but once the network exists, it is very easy to identify the critical chain and the resource dependencies.

- Once all the stories are identified in an agile development effort, only those necessary for the first iteration are detailed into tasks. This is important for two reasons.

o First, the implementation approaches and detail may be different depending upon the order stories are executed.

o Second, creating detailed specifications for every story is both time and resource intensive, and it may well be unnecessary should direction change during development.

- For the Segway HT, we created a network of stories rather than tasks. The value here is that it was possible to start with the ultimate story -- Mass produce a Segway HT on our assembly line -- and then back all the way up to the initial stories such as Complete proof of concept and Secure funding.

- Once this network existed, it was clear what the critical chain would be: advancing the state of the art sufficiently to make the product viable. All other chains of stories would be subjugated to this one.

- The Segway HT was going