THE PLM STATE

The PLM State TBT: Super Friends Powers Activate!, or, Building an Effective PLM Team

Welcome to this week's TBT blog, originally published in 2012.

SuperFriends2I recently attended a round table discussion on product development and one of the speakers discussed the need to assemble a team of complementary talents with unique skills to successfully conceptualize and develop products. He actually invoked the Super Friends reference, and if you have read any of my previous blogs, you know that I am a sucker for a 70's era cartoon superhero reference. His comments of course got me thinking about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and what kind of team you need to have to successfully implement PLM, and of course, what better example do we have of an effective team than the Super Friends? They evoked fear in criminals everywhere and their unique combination of skills and abilities made them extremely effective. This blog will look at the key roles needed to successfully implement and deploy PLM in comparison to the major players in one of the most exciting crime fighting organizations since the X-men.

Thank goodness Wikipedia is done with their SOPA blackout or I wouldn't have the ability to look up all the members of the Super Friends team. According to the site, the 5 core heroes that made up the Super Friends were Aquaman, Batman, Robin, Superman, and Wonder Woman. There is a lot of variation after that but I think the core team for PLM mirrors this nicely with IT Man, Process Man, Project Man, Application Man, and the ever-versatile Integration/Data Migration Woman (thrown in for gender consistency). As far as role similarity is concerned, I think for somewhat arbitrary reasons we can align Aquaman with IT Man, Batman is Process Man, Robin is Project Man, Superman is Application Man and finally, Wonder Woman is Integration/Data Migration Woman. Now that we have established the identities of each team member we can discuss why these elements are needed for a successful PLM implementation, and more importantly, why I have chosen to align each role with the Super Friends (kind of interested in what I come up with here myself).

Aquaman/IT Man
Every PLM tool must be installed on some form of hardware and thus having knowledgeable IT resources on your team is a critical element. This does not mean, however, that they are an IT Aquaman.jpggeneralist who does not understand the nuances of installing PLM software. The critical element is that they need to be immersed (like underwater) in PLM from an IT perspective. As an example, both Agile PLM and Windchill (as do other PLM software) offer some idiosyncrasies beyond your typical Oracle- or SQL-based solutions. If you understand how these applications work, it can be fairly straightforward to get them functioning properly in most environments. You also need to know when an environment is not going to be optimal for a PLM solution. There is nothing worse than a fish out of water (more wordplay) when it comes to PLM. If your environment is configured in the wrong way, performance will handcuff your deployment and user acceptance will plummet. Trying to run too many things on a single computer or under provisioning resources are common errors when it comes to PLM IT related issues. Obviously, Aquaman is very comfortable in his environment and can marshal resources to come to his assistance to accomplish his tasks. IT Man has similar abilities and should be able to have full command of his environment to arrange things as they are needed to ensure a successful PLM installation.

Historically, my blogs have been pretty long, but, to help my objective of publishing more frequently, I am going to break this up and address each role over the next couple of weeks. Check back next week for my next installment which will be Batman as Process Man, and feel free to share your own thoughts on PLM roles and their superhero counterparts.

[Edit: Repost from 2012]

 

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