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Teradyne Jaguar Project

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary 2
Background 3
Teradyne 3
The Semiconductor Industry 3
Teradyne Culture 4
Jaguar Project 4
Situational Analysis 5
Project Retrospective 6
Lack of Experience 6
Poor quality 6
Late action 6
Escalation of Commitment 6
Project Management tools usage 6
What should have been done? 6
Way to move forward 7

Executive Summary

Background
Teradyne
Teradyne is a 45 year old corporation specialized in testing equipment for transistors and other electrical components of the semiconductor industry. The company was founded in 1960 by two MIT graduates with a vision to bring a line of reliable, fast testing equipment to the industry. As the complexity and volume of components manufactured by their customers …show more content…

Teradyne Culture
Teradyne’s background was strongly focused on engineering as many of the senior managers came from an engineering background. Projects were driven mainly by performance, focusing on technical competence. Engineers were motivated to dive into tasks, and encouraged to prove themselves. The company emphasized the individual. Many employees considered themselves at Teradyne for the long haul. Long hours were normal.
In early 1990’s, Teradyne experienced a major change in leadership with the new CEO Alex D’Arbeloff. Alex grew interested in the risk of losing Teradyne’s competitive edge due to quality and reliability concerns. Although D’Arbeloff believed the team was exceedingly competent, he believed there were major operating problems regarding reporting and performance measurements. To minimize these problems, D’Arbeloff embraced total quality management (TQM). After 5 years of intensive effort, TQM principles were embedded into most aspects of work at the company and resulted in noticeable improvement in manufacturing quality and customer service. However, the engineering organization was resisting TQM because of the resulting late and over budget projects.
Jaguar Project
In 2001, Teradyne senior management decided to make a fundamental change in the strategy and aimed to create a single flexible tester platform. The project named as Jaguar to represent how critical it is to the

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