Jaguar Teradyne

Before Teradyne introduced their Jaguar Project in 2001, which should become a revolutionizing project management concept, the company tried different project scheduling tools such as the TQM or the APP. However there were not any significant improvements in the project planning and execution, which the company seniors were looking for. These project management tools required the employees to approach projects in a very regulated way, which they thought of as an intrusion to their free working culture. Furthermore goals of the projects were not clearly defined up front resulting in the expansion of the scope as employees added new aspects to the projects. Thus the phase­gate model was introduced, to ensure proper project tracking. In this model, the company focused more on using milestones and review points whereas the
Jaguar project involved newly introduced project management practices, which made the employee spend more time on the initial stages of project developing, including identifying risks and customer requirements early on. The new tools included work breakdown structure,
3­point estimation, critical path analysis and earned value analysis. Another aspect that changed with the Jaguar project was the structure of teams. In the past, the different departments worked separately and there was no one taking responsibility for the entire project, resulting in quality issues and delays. In the Jaguar project, Teradyne decided to build task focused teams with a team leader each. Experts from different office locations were drawn together to improve the talent base of each team. These leaders together form the core team to ensure proper coordination and communication by having weekly and monthly meetings. In addition to this the core team was headed by a single senior executive who was hence responsible for the entire project. To monitor the work in progress of the different teams, a program scheduling software, Primavera, was put into