Article Summary: Teradyne Corp.

: The Jaguar Project

Name: Siddhanth Ganesan

ID: sganesan7
Due: 1/22/2015

Problem: The founders of Teradyne imprinted a strong engineering culture which encouraged
individual initiative. Most of the senior managers were engineers and as such there was
resistance to any initiatives proposed by upper management that advocated structured approaches
to problem solving, because they encroached on the freedoms of the engineers. Furthermore
there was no single individual placed in charge of a project leading to miscommunication and
bad coordination between separate sub teams in charge of different parts of a project. Despite
some employees adopting the Aggregate process planning and management tools, they still over
committed and came up with unrealistic schedules. Due to this they brought new products to the
market later than they could have.

Company Objectives: The objective of the Jaguar group was to create a flexible tester platform
which could adapt to different device segments by mid-2004. In order to reorganize and create
the jaguar group, two groups working on their own flexible tester designs needed to be merged.
Given that the approaches of the two groups were different there was tension over which
approach was better. The engineers approach to project planning had to change in order to meet
the market window. However, Teradynes financial situation and the fact that Teradyne withdrew
from the memory market ensured that it had both the available manpower and financial resources
to undertake this project.

Alternate approaches: Manpower for Software on the Jaguar group was considerably lower
than it should have been in the start, considering that few employees in the group had knowledge
of IG-XL, the operating system developed for the use if the platform FLEX. In order to make up
for the low amount of knowledge more Jaguar software needed more manpower as well as
training. A small part of the team working in Boston should have temporarily been sent to work
with the Jaguar team to get the software sub team up to speed on the operating system.
Furthermore, as soon as it was evident that the software team was unable to keep up, as evident
from the EV graphs, the Upper management should have intervened. Training the employees on
the use of the management tools and cautioning against getting fixated on individual milestones
might have helped the project get completed on time.