The critical software and technical systems we rely on daily are like invisible skyscrapers all around us — yet we often don’t know who designed them, how they were constructed, or whether they hide defects that could lead to massive inconvenience, financial chaos, or catastrophic failures.

In Part 7 of our eight-part video series, we take a big-picture perspective on the steps involved with the digital thread.

In Part 6 of our eight-part video series, we detail the quality assurance and inspection of a digitally manufactured component.

If there’s one thing that’s certain about undertaking complex projects, it’s that not everything will work out exactly the way you planned. The Spring 2015 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review highlights project management, in “Reducing Unwelcome Surprises in Project Management,” “How Executive Sponsors Influence Project Success,” “What Successful Project Managers Do” and “Accelerating Projects by Encouraging Help.” In a nutshell, managers must expect the unexpected in projects.

In each stage of a project’s life cycle, two or three behaviors have significant impact on the project’s likelihood for success. These behaviors, by the executive who is sponsoring the project, ensure effective partnerships with project managers and require a great deal of informal dialogue. They include setting performance goals, establishing priorities, ensuring quality and capturing lessons learned.

No company can last for long without satisfied customers. But misguided attempts to improve satisfaction can damage a company’s financial health. Research finds that the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer spending behavior is very weak, and that the return on investments in increasing customer satisfaction is often trivial or even negative. What matters is how customers rank your brand in satisfaction relative to your competitors.

In our 2011 survey of 4,000 people about The New Intelligent Enterprise, 44% said uniformly consistent data quality across the organization is a more important characteristic than the data’s timeliness (31%) or even relevance (30%).

The conventional wisdom is that products that have a strong established base of users can often trump higher-quality alternatives. But recent research suggests otherwise.

Complex supply chains with many agents are more prone to problems, and on occasion, to spectacular collapse. Examples from the last few years include the subprime mortgage crisis; the failure of the Peanut Corporation of America; and dioxin-contaminated Irish pork. Without a doubt, today’s complex supply chains are vulnerable to opportunistic behavior leading to sometimes catastrophic failure. But there are five steps managers can take to protect their companies.

Competing in China is the only option for multinationals that want to build or preserve their global position.

How leading companies use price, speed, quality and flexibility to drive innovation and shareholder value.

THE APPROACHES FOR IMPROVING QUALITY IN MANUFACTURING PROCESSES DON’T WORK ESPECIALLY WELL FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. THE AUTHORS provide a quality improvement paradigm for the software industry that builds on manufacturing models but focuses on reused learning and experience by establishing “experience factories.” Their iterative process enables an organization to acquire core competencies to support its strategic capabilities.