Kevin Grant

University of Texas at San Antonio | UTSA

This article contributes insights that engineering managers can use to cultivate organizational learning through competition. Contemporary firms face the challenge of successfully translating quality improvements into sustainable competitive advantages. Organizational learning is crucial to making quality improvements sustainable. This case study e...

As contemporary manufacturing companies embark upon the lean transformation, they are relying upon a more collaborative, cross-trained workforce that strives to deliver a quality product at the required time. This longitudinal study tracked five multifunctional work teams involved in a pull system implementation effort at an electronics assembly pl...

Our study is motivated by the problems encountered by external collaborators, particularly those between research and development laboratories and commercial partners, when writing technology transfer contracts. Kruskal–Wallis one-way nonparametric Analyses of Variance are used to analyze Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) fr...

Meaningful risk analysis can dramatically improve the likelihood of project managers delivering major system development projects on time. At issue are the questions, "Which risk events are most likely to occur?" and "Which risk events will have the most severe impact on the project schedule?" A study of 22 major aerospace system development progra...

Technology transfer has become an increasinglyimportant mission of federal laboratories in the United States, with resultsthat benefit the government, private companies, and the U.S. economy. However,the performance of this mission over the past decade has been a mix ofsuccesses and failures. Research performed to improve this performance byidentif...

The project management community is actively demonstrating substantial interest in the development of viable methods to assess and improve project management maturity. This interest also underscores the important need to assess project management maturity among industries to provide many organizations a means to benchmark their maturity relative to...

The primary objective of this effort was to prototype the Projects in Space learning experience. We designed this active learning experience to impart core project management skills. We placed special emphasis on training project managers to recognize, share, and apply team member expertise to project planning, decision-making, and problem solving....

Successful technology management in the contemporary business environment requires the ability to rapidly translate new ideas into viable commercial products that serve the needs of the market place. Delays experienced during the development of new products only impede the rate of progress that is so critical to the success of the technology-intens...

The project management community is currently investing substantially in the development of viable methods to assess and improve project management maturity. This investment often drives a corresponding need to monitor progress—internally and with respect to other similar organizations. To support this need, this research provides a cross-industry...

Executive Summary Team leadership is vital to the successful performance of a project team. One important factor that influences the success of team leadership efforts is the structure of the project team. We identify four distinct project team models and their leadership implications. The relative degree of involvement of the project manager and t...

Common methods for uncertainty analysis characterize the possible cost and schedule outcomes of a project using a probability density function (pdf). Heuristic methods have been proposed for uncertainty analysis that assume the shape of the total cost pdf is either normally or lognormally distributed. Little evidence exists to either confirm or ref...

Numerous studies have identified attributes which are associated with effective project managers. One of the more frequently cited attributes is technical competence. This study surveyed 228 project managers from the government sector of the defense aerospace community to determine the importance of technical competence to project managers. More im...