-: Alright, my name is Jeff Payne.
I am the director of Program Management for Progress Rail.
My group is responsible for the management of
research and development projects and projects for
repower locomotives and aftermarket,
for the locomotive side of the business.
Alright, so a repower project might be, you know, a customer
will come in and they want us to take a locomotive that's
been out in the field for 40 years, and obviously over the
last 40 years, technology has changed quite a bit and they
want us to strip the locomotive down, put a new engine in,
put some new components in and kind of rebuild
the locomotive to where, it's like, new.
That would be like, a repower project for us.
Some aftermarket projects would include some software work,
kits, material kits, where the customer will take
a new software, some parts that will go along with it and
they they'll implement that on to their locomotives.
And then a research and development project would be,
kind of, like a new product that we're inventing to enter
in the market or significantly improve
one of our existing products.
You know, my group is responsible for
each one of these projects, managing the project.
Essentially that means from launching the project,
to monitoring and controlling it, and closing the project.
So, my role, in particular to that,
is I'm responsible for the group.
So, you know, I manage the program managers,
hold them accountable to meeting their project schedules.
Along with that, I also have a business analyst
that works for me and
him and I work together to determine the number of resources
that we need in our engineering department.
We develop the corporate engineering budget,
and we help on a monthly basis coordinate and manage
that budget throughout the year to make
sure we hit our budget.
We may have a launch of a major new product for
research and development that may be
hundreds of thousands of hours and you know,
2000 tasks in the schedule, if not more.
On the flip side, you can have a project that is 500 hours,
for an aftermarket project and
your schedule entails 20 tasks, 30 tasks.
The more complex the project is, the more tasks it's gonna
have and in our group we have project schedulers that are
responsible for building and maintaining
those schedules on a regular basis.