Rino Jose, our principal co-founder, felt this pain firsthand during his 10 years in high tech as a software engineer and then as an engineering manager. Surely, he thought, there must be a tool or a methodology for doing this better. There wasn’t. That’s why we started this company.

Why are Engineering Projects in Trouble?

We’ve spent the past two years interviewing engineering managers and executives about why they thought so many projects head south. Here’s what they told us:

• Key staff are overloaded.
  Competing priorities make it difficult to plan and manage the project portfolio. A lot of effort and meetings go into coordinating shared resources. The key staff in these projects drive the schedule.
• The inevitably of unplanned work.
  Because so much of engineering is doing something that’s never been done before, unplanned work is the rule rather than the exception. Dealing with new work or tasks that will take longer than originally planned is difficult because it puts additional strain on channels of communication and coordination.
• Products keep changing.
  Markets keep changing. Requirements are in flux. The relative value of a company’s product mix is constantly in motion. It’s hard to hit a moving target, but often that’s what organizations must do. Doing this well requires efficient coordination and communication, a sore point in every organization.
• Too much effort to manage projects.
  The typical response to dealing with project management is to throw manpower at it. Often, we take our most talented individuals and make them into project managers, hoping that we can leverage their skills and apply them to a larger group. What typically happens is that you lose three times: you lose their individual contribution, you add to the growing inconsistency in your team’s execution, and you demoralize a talented employee.

How Lakeway Frontier can help

This is where Lakeway Frontier comes in. Frontier proposes — and embodies — a new philosophy for how engineering teams can most effectively be managed. We’ll describe the “Lakeway Management Philosophy” in a future post, but for now, here are some of the highlights of how Lakeway Frontier addresses the key problems above.

How Frontier helps with overloaded staff

Our proprietary technology automatically ranks every task in an organization by value. This resolves conflicts for overloaded resources and generates leveled schedules for everyone. As a bonus, you get realtime visibility into your project schedules!

How Frontier helps with unplanned work

With Frontier, you can see the impact of unplanned work immediately, and that impact is instantly communicated to everyone in your organization that may be affected by the change–even across projects and functions.

How Frontier helps with product change

Our value-based scheduling technology automatically integrates product value information with project structure to keep everyone’s work aligned with top-level value. This enables effortless coordination across functional boundaries.

How Frontier helps automate project management

Frontier uses workflows to guide team execution. Capture how you’d like your process to work and Frontier will guide your teams forward. Frontier slashes the time you spend in status meetings by taking two pieces of information, effort left and effort spent, and using them to track everything in your projects automatically.