A Leadership Mindset, fixing issues on the field (GEMBA) with humility, rigor and ethics

A leader shares his/her knowledge, does not withhold information or engage in politics, initiates change on the field, uses state-of-the-art tools and processes, and encourages his/her colleagues to do the same by demonstrating the gains in efficiency, quality, reliability, safety, and costs for his/her team and company.

Program Manager (& hierarchical manager) in a small "projectized" organization (where PMs are both responsible for resources & budgets) as opposed to matrix (strong/weak) and functional organizations (where Discipline Managers are both responsible for resources and budgets): see interesting article on this topic

Scope: Develop and Maintain 3 Automotive SW Products for an OEM (PSA/Stellantis): DIAMUX products which are used by PSA to upgrade, calibrate & configure all ECUs on their vehicles in all manufacturing sites (HUGE PRESSION)

- Management of 6 on-site PM, Architects/Engineers and 6 offshore Engineers based in Vietnam
- Project Estimates and Scheduling, Project Tracking (see extract of Program & Workload Plan below - no ALM available, so created a fully automated plan in excel)
- Creation of the first Project Dashboard (Top Risks/Issues, Progress, status)
- Customer facing in a contentious context (very aggressive customer PM => 3 different PMs in 1 year only on our side), problems solving, reporting to our Management
- Delivery of the Product releases (DIAMUX, OTTOMAN, ORUS DIAG + Evolutive & Corrective Maintenance Releases => 2-3 formal SW Product Releases per month)
- Change Management and bugs tracking (Mantis Bug Tracker)
- Improvement of the quality of the SW releases thanks to the hiring of a SW Requirement Engineer in charge of setting up a SW specification including tagged / labeled SW requirements with all required quality criteria (unique ID, atomic, verifiable, clear and non ambiguous, etc.) that are then traced to source code and test cases using state-of-the-art tool called Reqtify to manage all traceability and consistency metrics of our product development lifecycle
- Significant increase of the agility and productivity of the Project Team via the hiring of an Open Source technologies (SVN) and Configuration/Build/Release Expert (Time needed to build a full SW release decreased from 1/1.5 days to approx. 4 hours)
- Produced one of the key assets for our Technical and Financial offer (see below the entire workload plan including all team resources and all requirement, architecture, coding, testing, release tasks and covering all 3 SW tools/projects and evolutive and corrective maintenance WPs) that allowed the company to demonstrate our capability to achieve the program objectives and to be awarded on this DIAMUX program again (although there was a very contentious context between PSA (Stellantis) Project Manager and See4Sys SW Team)
- I've been rewarded with a brand-new smartphone offered by the company
See feedback from Luis below, the Open source expert and Release Manager I hired, and from the Senior Business Manager in charge of the client PSA/Stellantis, Frank Buridan

With this fully automated workload plan, we take into account all the available human resources for the DIAMUX program (in France and Vietnam), their leave and potential absences, all activities in the lifecycle of the 3 DIAMUX products, OTTOMAN, and ORUS DIAG along with the various Work Packages and the lots for evolutive and corrective maintenance, and the various/cross-functional assignments within the company. By assigning different loads to within 2 hours for different resources across the various products and lots, totals by resource and by country (France / Vietnam) are calculated automatically, and if the resources are underloaded or overloaded, the corresponding cells appear very visibly in green or red, which allows the Program Manager to smooth resources over time and make realistic estimates and plans to provide the best visibility to the client PSA and the internal Management.

This automated plan was a MAJOR ASSET (according to the Business Manager himself) during the presentation of our small Parisian site’s offer to PSA to obtain the new award for the DIAMUX program that saved the Paris offices which would have disappeared without this project, as Luis also indicated in his feedback.

I've had Program/Project/Team Management-Lead or PMO Planner responsibilities in very different environments:

Program/Project Manager in a  very "projectized" structure (Automotive small engineering company) in a chaotic environment with (see details in section below):

- the responsibility for both the budget and the resources

- very high pressure from both the customer (OEM PSA/Stellantis) and the internal senior management

- no support from independent quality assurance or similar team

- no processes/tools in place, whatever the topic is: Project Management, Requirement Traceability & Consistency, V&V Automation, Build& Release, Quality Assurance, Agility, etc.

- a customer PM with mechanical background so no understanding of modern SW methods which constantly leads to a contentious context between the OEM and our SW team

- a Technical Director (my Line Manager) in place thanks to nepotism and consequently not ensuring his responsibilities (2 weeks off during CRITICAL RFQ phase, he used to frequently bypass me and go against my discussion with the client about establishing stronger processes, the list of incompetencies is too long...)

SW Project Lead and Firefighter in a matrix Tier-1 organization (LEM) in an environment still growing between chaotic and mature (not yet ASPICE Level 1 in all processes):

- the responsibility for coordinating all SW activities for each SW Release with the TPL, the System Engineer, the Head of SW, the SW Team and the V&V Manager

- very high pressure from both the customer and the internal senior management since I replaced a suddenly unavailable SWPL when we were about to deliver PPAP and SOP

- 2 years of Joint Reviews between Volvo and LEM were not done, therefore I had a HUGE work to catch up everything for the PPAP milestone

- the PM was totally disconnected from the reality of the SW domain, consequently there was a lot of support to bring to him to help him communicate properly with the customer

-  BTW, I received written congratulations from the Component Owner of Volvo Trucks for the PPAP milestone :)

Powertrain SW Project Lead in a strong matrix OEM organization in a very structured context (CMMI L3, MBD):

- Initially in charge of 1 SW project for an Engine Management System ECU
- On the field learning of the Diesel and Gasoline Powertrain Motors (Combustion Cycle, Intake, Compression, Power, Exhaust, Cylinder, Pistons, injectors, etc.) directly used to properly design the application layer of the Powertrain Control SW by working with the different SW Function Leads to integrate the relevant version of each SW function into the Application SW (Model Based Design in Simulink)
- Management of a Team of 2 on-site engineers (Build/Configuration and Calibration Engineers)
- Interface with all required SW Function Leads to design the Application SW of 2 Diesel Engine Management Systems

- One of my main objectives was to design the Application SW so that the overall Powertrain complies with Euro 5 norm
- Monitoring of the ECU and Basic SW supplier (BOSCH).
- Interface with PMO for the monthly update of the SW Dashboard, KPIs and Risks & Issues.
- Clear and concise reporting to the Program Manager in Monthly Steering committee, always in line with Quality, Costs, Timing and Scope objectives.
- Mission unfortunately stopped due to serious physical health issue (recurrence of pneumothorax/lung collapse) requiring huge pleura surgery and long term recovery.

Supposed to take the lead of this SW project in 6 months, I have been very proactive and autonomous after 3 months only.
Therefore my Line Manager assigned a new Diesel Powertrain ECU project to me very shortly. He said I was the best external SW Lead he hired during his time at Renault.

Quality & Validation Testing Team Lead in a mature Tier-1 organization (achieving CMMI L2): follow the link

PMO Planner in RENESAS Electronics Europe in a very structured environment (CMMI L3, ISO9001, Ms Project Server, AUTOSAR):

-Scope: Estimating, Planning and tracking of AUTOSAR Verification projects
Duration: 12 months
Resources: 1 PMO Project Planner, 1 AUTOSAR Verification Manager, ~6 Verification Engineers (on-site & offshore)

- Established WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and Estimation Forms with AUTOSAR Verification Manager (3 points estimates: Triangular & PERT distributions)
- Established Project Schedule in Microsoft Project Server and baselined these as required
- Regular Leveling of the Project Resources in Microsoft Project Server + use of project web app
- Tracked project progress with AUTOSAR Verification Manager in weekly meeting
- Closed Project (Closed Project schedule, identified Lessons Learned, organized project closure review)

See the very good feedback from the Expert Planner (Joanne) and the AUTOSAR Verification Manager (Meena) regarding my PMO skills (scroll a little bit down after clicking)