When your project is going to retire all the documents, JIGs, bits and peaces need to archive.
This is the time to think further.
In most cases, project managers create a zip file of all the documents at their disposal.
R&D and production engineers do the same with the additions they put some hardware elements into a box as well.
No one cares too much about what will happen if the project has to be reactivated in a few years.
This is a mistake and the cost can be very high.
Electronic technology is evolving rapidly, a few years and techniques are becoming obsolete, procedures are being forgotten.
Although test hardware will continue to be usable in the future, the same cannot be said for test software.
And what happens if the leading R & D engineers will leave, and no one remembers the project?
Here are some example:
- test software is incompatible with the current operating systems
- script languages are not necessary backward compatible
- programming hardware are becoming unsupported
- the test documentation is not clear enough, hard to follow
How can we help solve these problems?
We have developed some practice to collect all the necessary information and create proper archives.
You can then offer several options depending on the desired archive time.
The archive time is the key here. Some projects will be reactivated in a few years, some only decades later.
Make no mistake, it is very rare if a project will never be reactivated.
The price of our archiving job includes help to reactivate the project inside the accepted time frame.