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Product Engineering is inherently a collaborative process. The design, development, QA, and support teams collaborate to develop the product with in the scheduled time and with the desired quality. These teams are often located at multiple locations and have minimal or no face to face interaction. In this scenario, sharing the information effectively within and across the teams becomes critical to ensure timely delivery of the product.
Product Engineering portals provide an effective solution to this problem. Considering that there are matured portal development platforms like Microsoft Share-point portals available today, the engineering portals can be created within a short timeframe. This article discusses some of the possible contents of the product engineering portals.
The engineering portal contents can be classified as follows:
Engineering Resources
Engineering Processes
Engineering Plan documents
Product Engineering Deliverables
Engineering Management
The engineering resources section contains all types of resources that are available with engineering division and that are shared by the different engineering teams. It contains machine name, configuration, IP address, space assignment, tasks assignment, IT person responsible for trouble-shooting any machine related issue etc. These resources are referenced by the engineering tasks to which these resources are assigned.
Engineering process documents section provides a place where all the up-to-date versions of the methodology related documents are located. These documents might be process details, deliverable templates, coding guide-lines, engineering best practices etc.
Engineering plans for each version of the product or module are made accessible through the engineering portal so that these can be referenced by the team members and can be updated by the engineering managers.
The engineering deliverables from the product marketing, management, design, development, build, QA, and support teams can also be made accessible from the engineering portal. The portal development products available these days provide a mechanism by which work-flows can be assigned to these deliverables so that the documents can be tracked while they are being reviewed and approved.
The engineering management section of the portal is used to record and track day to day tasks of the project. It contains all engineering tasks that need to be performed during the product development life-cycle. It also links the tasks with the machine, software, and human resources that will be used to perform the task. It contains minutes of all the engineering meetings and assigns action items to the engineers. In addition to the tasks, all issues are also recorded and tracked. By looking at this section, any project team member can determine what tasks, issues, ad action items are assigned to him or her. The weekly status reports that contain the status of each deliverable and pending issues are also accessible through the portal.
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