Thursday morning I bumped into Kathryn Kranen, President and CEO of Jasper Design Automation, after the 2007 EDA Marketing Forum (formerly Hacks & Flacks) at DAC. The marketing forum itself was fascinating and will be the subject of a future post. Kathryn asked if I would take a look at a video she'd put together for the Productivity Impact Luncheon at DAC on Tuesday. I was actually signed up to attend the luncheon but ended up attending the Synopsys VMM luncheon instead after the rest of my colleagues abandoned me so they could see Brent Spiner (Commander Data) and Marina Sirtis (Counselor Deanna Troi) at the Mentor Graphics "Next Generation Verification Luncheon".
The video, entitled "How Engineers and Managers Communicate: A Video Parody", is about 10 minutes long and shows a fictional design team from "WonderChips, a fictitious but successful communications chip company" deciding on a methodology, tools, and schedule for an upcoming project. The video starts off a bit slowly and the production quality is poor (apparently the video was shot in a day and produced over the course of a week) but it touches on some key points and highlights the misunderstandings between engineering and management that can lead to major project schedule and cost overruns. Basically, management doesn't want to spend money on new tools and methodologies up front and cuts the bottom-up schedule done by the design team in half, and the engineers decide almost immediately that the project "will be done when it's done". Sound familiar? I thought so. I got a few good chuckles out of the video and I'm sure you will too. Check it out!
