It's Time To Rock The Boat

Hardware development is a complex endeavor … and it's getting more complex all the time. No surprise there. For any project, there are decisions made on a daily basis that can seriously affect quality, cost and time-to-market. These decisions affect people too which can impact productivity in profound ways. Everyone is aware that a high morale and highly motivated team always outperforms a dysfunctional team!

To help us make decisions regarding technology, there's no shortage of tools, information and opinions out there. We have tool vendors, IP vendors, service providers, languages, libraries, methodologies, email alerts, newsletters, conferences, blogs, message boards, twitter, linkedin, etc, etc, etc. Most of these things work pretty well or we wouldn't be able to create the marvelous devices we have today; but some of them don't work all that well for a variety of reasons. It's hard sometimes to separate the wheat from the chaff as the saying goes.

So why throw more information at a crowd that is already inundated with it? Because what's obvious to us is that as an industry, we are almost silent on the impact of strong leadership and management as it relates to hardware development.

The XtremeEDA Professional Development Series is about examining hardware development in its entirety as a profession; one that is more than just a job or a collection of individual responsibilities. We'll touch the engineering management side of hardware development, but focus primarily on the leadership and team building aspects that differentiate good people and teams from the outstanding ones.