Speaker: Carl Angotti, President Angotti Product Development
Meeting Date: Thursday, January 5, 2012
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: RAMADA Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale, CA

 
Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: How to keep Engineering Projects on Track
In this talk, Mr. Angotti will discuss several methods for keeping high technology projects on track during the development of a piece of hardware. The projects he works on include those that involve designing such items as the mechanical enclosure, electro-mechanical elements, electronic microcontroller-based hardware with various input/output configurations, firmware, programmable FPGAs, and software.

Mr. Angotti assumes that the project team is often not co-located and sometimes even remotely located. He also assumes that the product will be manufactured in a moderate to very-high volume. Very often, these projects have considerable tooling requirements and expenses. They can also be subject to serious quality assurance work sometimes done off premises. Sometimes, manufacture might take place at locations far from the design center.

The presentation is based on his white paper “The 12 Best Strategies for Keeping Engineering Projects on Track” that is located on his website at http://www.angotti.com/12strat.html.

Because of time constraints, he will focus on only five of these strategies during the talk. These include approaches for:

• Handling the early days of a project
• Generating a formal Specification and System Block Diagram
• Developing a plan to handle the “unknown-unknowns” for a project
• Creating practical ways to develop metrics to track progress
• Handling the inevitable project overruns at the project end

During the presentation, Mr. Angotti will describe why not handling these situations properly can get projects off track. He will share his experience in solving such project issues and invite audience members to ask questions and share their related experiences.

Bio:
Carl Angotti, is President of Angotti Product Development, a consulting company helps clients accelerate their product development projects. He has more than 40 years of professional experience in electronics engineering. More than 30 of those years have been spent as a consultant to Bay Area high-tech firms. Carl often serves as project leader and coordinator for the projects he works on for his clients. In just the last 10 years he has worked on more than 25 high tech projects. His experience includes companies in the medical, consumer, telecommunications, industrial controls and automated test industries. These include companies ranging in size from startups to mid-sized companies, to small teams located inside larger organizations.

Mr. Angotti holds an MBA from San Jose State University, an MSEE from the University of Southern California, and a BSEE from Carnegie-Mellon University.

He is a Life Member of the IEEE, and a member of the IEEE TMC, the IEEE Consultants Network of Silicon Valley, PATCA (Professional and Technical Consultants Association), and the Project Management Institute (PMI). He is a Registered Professional Engineer and has just served as the immediate past Chair of the IEEE TMC.