Panel: Managing Design Change - Lessons Learned

Corporate re-engineering has become the new buzz word of the 90's. Several best selling business books have been written about the subject. Electronic design organizations have not been immune to this trend. As business becomes increasingly competitive, management pressure grows to get products to market more quickly. Meanwhile, engineering is struggling with how they will design their first 100,000 gate ASIC using more complex tools. Companies are forced into rethinking ways to radically improve design productivity. Company presidents are issuing corporate wide edicts such as "10x design process productivity improvement by 1998". Re-engineering the design process is one of the alternatives that some companies have tried. They have architected and implemented integrated multi-vendor design environments. They have installed automated parts library and workflow management systems. They have re-organized into cross functional teams, and trained their engineers on new design methodologies and design automation best practices. The journey of managing significant process change has been a long and arduous one down a road full of potholes. Murphy's law, cultural inertia, politics, inexperience, underestimating, underfunding, lack of top management commitment, and more have conspired to grind projects to a halt. This panel is a collection of griselled veterans who will tell about their personal experiences of attempting to mange process change.