Teradyne Corporation: The Jaguar Project

Case submission
(Submitted towards case analysis under Project Management)
EPGP-03/EEPOM-04
IIM, Kozhikode.

Submitted By:

ePGP-03-056 Raghava Chandra Tripathi

eMEP-10-008 Dinesh Shastri
eMEP-10-006 Chandradeep Kanakamedala
ePGP-03-053 Pavan Kumar Muddana

Project Management, IIMK 1

 Teradyne Corporation: The Jaguar Project

About Teradyne Corporation

Teradyne is a 45 year old corporation, founded by Alex d’Arbeloff and Nick DeWolf, students of Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1940s.
$1.8 billion in sales in 2004 with over 6000 employees.
Teradyne corporation has following major units:
•Semi-Conductor Test (64% revenue)
•Assembly Test
•Broadband Test
•Connection Systems and Diagnostic Solutions

About Jaguar Project

The project was envisioned as a culmination of sorts in Teradyne’s 8 year effort to improve product
development process.
Company decided to abolish the markets-segment-focused platform into a single platform engineering
group.
Teradyne senior management made a pivotal strategic decision to embrace a flexible platform that can be
easily adapted to the needs for difference device segments.
Main emphasis was to use project management tools to streamline the product development activities.
 Teradyne Corp.: Present Project Management Practices Vs. Jaguar
Project

Strategy Traditional Project Execution Jaguar Project Execution

Not defined clearly up front as requirements
are not clear and not defined. The
Goal and Scope definition engineering and other stakeholders added
many features during development which
increasing the delivery time & quality.
Teradyne’s culture was to mandate the use of
specific tools, but it was left up to the
Project Management tools
individual divisions and managers to decide
There was very less visibility to higher
Visibility to higher
management on the project status and phase.
management
Requirements & scope are very clearly
defined. Delivery date is also finalized and
adding scopes during development was not
allowed.
Formalized project management tools like
Work Breakdown structure, 3-point
estimation, Critical Path analysis, Earned value
analysis are used.
Clear visibility and tracking was possible.

Progress tracking was highly variable even Usage of tools resulting in near accurate
within divisions, some were using phase gate tracking of project status.
Project Status tracking
model, detailed project planning, conduction
after-action reviews and others not.
Market-segment-focused platform for testing. Embrace a flexible platform strategy.
Test Strategy There was different test platform for each
market segment.
Mostly over committed. Some times to the Correct commitment was provided, but
extent of 300%. sometimes forced people into commitment
Resource allocation
which was not possible in real world.
 Jaguar Project : Impact of Project management tools

•Higher management did not pay enough attention to the data provided by project
management tools and they did not get the understanding of the metrics.
•Most of the time in meeting were spend on finding the right tool, right way to report the
data rather than think about the product solutions.
•The Teradyne culture of individual contribution was slowing eroding and people started to
feel that they are not responsible for the project delivery timelines.
•Hardware system were largely able to keep on track on timelines, but the software
development emerged as a problem.
•Software development division were under enormous pressure to keep the timelines.
•The learning required for new software platform like windows NT was affecting the project
delivery.
•The software challenge turned out to be a bigger than anticipated. Even though the
hardware units were on time due to software delays the push out was delayed by 6 months
for “Ultra Flex” systems.
 The Jaguar Project: Unintended consequences of using the
project management tools

•Some of the metric were not understood by the management teams and they choose to
use the metrics which was easier and understandable for them. This did not reflect on the
correct project status.
•More development resource were wasted due to the training, tracking and status update
meeting.
•Employees and development teams did not feel that it is their responsibility for project
delivery and expected higher management to govern.
•The need to update status and maintain the project management tools created a diversion
for the development teams from the real problems.
 The Jaguar Project: Lessons Learned

•Value of the project management tools has to be taught to the project manager and to the
teams.
•The need to understand and report the most important metric has to be trained to all stake
holders.
•The use of project management tools required a cultural change.
•There is a need for continuous monitoring of the project progress.
•Process is important. However, for process to be effective, capable people have to be there
to execute the process.
•Information overload to the Project Team should be avoided.
•Project management tools cannot be used for the development stuff where there is lots of
uncertainty.