Hardware Project Management: Why It's Different Than Software (and How to Fix Yours)

Key Takeaways

• Hardware engineering faces unique challenges due to physical dependencies, external supply chain constraints, and the high cost of errors compared to software.
• Modern tools have overcome past limitations, enabling hardware teams to accelerate development, reduce errors, and deepen collaboration.
• Altium Agile Teams modernizes electronics design and development by connecting people, processes, and data, bridging the tooling gap by enabling real-time collaboration between team members and concurrent PCB design.

The Hardware-Software Tooling Gap

Hardware engineers have good reasons to look at the software industry with a certain envy. But perhaps the most coveted perk is the exquisite tooling software developers have access to.

Consider an ordinary afternoon as a software developer, pushing a small change to your git repository. Within ninety seconds, a virtual machine running CI software has built your app, run the test suite, scanned every dependency for known vulnerabilities, and reported the impact of your changes on the codebase. Nobody explicitly asked for any of this. It happens completely automatically, on every push, for every engineer, whether or not anyone remembered to be careful. And it’s standard practice across the sector.

Hardware project management, until recently, lacked the automated workflows that have made the software development process so incredibly efficient. Changes to boards may sit as poorly versioned files somewhere on your OneDrive, get mentioned in a meeting, get scattered across messages on a Teams thread, and perhaps end up in a zip file optimistically named "Final". That’s without considering the endless emails back and forth with the EMS (contract manufacturer) to actually get the change into production.

Every step along the way rests on busy, overworked, and stressed engineers keeping track of changes and communicating them to their colleagues. In a modern software development team, these records are shared by default using platforms every member can access and use seamlessly. For example, every commit may sit in one repository the whole team can read, linking to the author, a change note and diff, as well as comments and tickets on Jira (the issue tracker). Software is distributed largely automatically, requiring little human intervention: there’s no phone call to the EMS in software.

The gap in automation and effectiveness between software and hardware is not a matter of discipline. Hardware teams are, if anything, more careful and deliberate than software teams, because they have to be.

Software built its tooling and culture out of fear of ruinous errors and decades of pragmatic problem solving born of hard-earned lessons. Barry Boehm’s research on the cost of change, gathered across decades of projects, found that the same defect in software grew more expensive at every phase it survived: cheap in requirements, costly in test, truly expensive in production. Hardware design and manufacturing stretches that effect much further still. A 2014 US Department of Commerce survey of DoD programs estimated that resolving a component obsolescence issue costed about $1,028 where an approved replacement part already exists, but $1,092,856 where the next higher assembly has to be redesigned, and $10,287,964 for a complex redesign or system replacement. 

A salient example: imagine choosing the wrong insulation materials for cables in an airliner. At one end of the design and manufacturing process, the cost might be purely second thought or a few words in a requirements document. At the other end, it might be a career-ending mass recall and rework. If not tragedy. 

Investigating the 1998 Swissair 111 accident, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada found that an electrical arc "ignited the flammable cover material on nearby metallized polyethylene terephthalate (MPET) covering on the thermal acoustic insulation blankets," and concluded that the existing process "allowed the use of materials that could be ignited and sustain or propagate fire."

PCB design behaves much the same way. By the time a mistake is discovered, it may exist as a thousand boards assembled in the final product, all on a pallet being delivered to your most important customer. What software can fix with a “git revert”, hardware may only fix with a board respin, retooling, rework, or a recall.

Three things make hardware changes harder to contain:

• The dependencies are physical. In software, a function can be added or altered on its own. In hardware, a change as small as swapping a part or a footprint sets off a chain reaction: neighbouring parts shift to make room, the thermal dissipation changes, and the enclosure may be modified with it. Often these are only after the prototype is built, because most of the team cannot see the electronic design.
• The constraints are external. A software team can often set its own release schedule. A hardware team answers to component lead times, logistics, EMS availability, and the time it takes to design test fixtures or tool up for PCB fabrication. There is no backporting a change, at least not without manual rework.
• The supply chain is part of the design. A library chosen for a piece of software can usually be updated in an afternoon. In hardware, for as long as the product ships, adopting a component is a conscious decision, repeated with every batch. Parts reach end of life, distributors run dry, prices move.

Hardware vs. Software Project Management

Modern Workflows with Altium Agile Teams

The solution to these hardware project management problems is the same one the software development world arrived at: keep the record of any changes and collaborate as close as possible to the design, which is where solutions like Altium Agile Teams come in.

1. Share Data Between Team Members

Traditionally, the ECAD-to-MCAD handoff is a one-way affair, a simple export of data handed on to other team members such as mechanical engineers. From then on, there are multiple versions of the truth, including the export and the original source files, requiring careful, tedious, and error-prone cross-checking when reviewing the design. By the time the various team members have provided feedback, the data might already be obsolete.

In Altium Agile Teams, the mechanical engineer co-designs with the electronics engineer in a shared cloud workspace. Advanced ECAD-MCAD co-design brings the latest state of the PCB into the mechanical design with a single click, as a native assembly, without losing mating parts and constraints.

The mechanical engineer can move components and connectors from their end; design changes are tracked between the two engineering domains, reconciled through a compare-and-approve flow, which does not require re-importing files again and again.

2. Bring the Whole Team Into the Same Workspace

PCB layout in practice has always been a solo canvas, painted by a single skilled individual. Not by preference or romance, but because there was no merge functionality in most ECAD software. Two people editing the same board meant risky copy-pasting, often after working hours, and always with no real-time feedback. It’s not uncommon for a lot of the work to go to waste as individuals have to manually align their work. For these reasons, the PCB authoring work has been largely serialized instead: one person routes while the others wait.

In Altium Agile Teams, more than one PCB designer or electronics engineer can work on the same design at the same time. Their changes are merged rather than overwriting one another’s. A global access licence covers up to 25 concurrent ECAD authors and up to 250 project collaborators, working from anywhere in the world. Under time pressure, parallelising work and collaborating among multiple engineers, each working on a section of the PCB, is a sure way to shorten development and reach the market sooner.

Not everyone who needs to see a PCB is a PCB design engineer. A test engineer, a purchasing manager, or a product owner may need to review the board, but none of them would enjoy using specialized ECAD software. Until now, that meant PDF documents and feeding comments manually one-by-one, losing real-time sync and precious context, such as component information.

PDFs cannot be queried: the reviewer cannot access part information, toggle layers, or confirm details in the BOM against the exact part. And of course, PDFs are just another form of export unlinked from its source data, risking the dangerous out-of-sync problems discussed above.

With Altium Agile Teams, multiple team members can asynchronously review the design in their browser and collaborate with comments while accessing full design information, including part details, 3D data, and BOMs. Team members such as product designers, EMC engineers, and management can reliably review a design without needing a meeting to reconcile the results.

3. Keep the Supply Chain Inside the Design

Ultimately, effective hardware project management requires integrating the supply chain tightly with the design. Choosing a component seems like a decision made only once. But in truth, it is a purchasing commitment, made again and again with every single batch for as long as the product ships. The last person who can change a component with no added cost or risk is the engineer who selected it correctly the first time. The risk when price, stock, and part lifecycle live separately from the design is that critical issues will not surface in time, and problems will be caught too late.

In Altium Agile Teams, your BOM lives in a cloud portal with a live connection to component supply chain data. No need to sync it manually and no risk of it being out of date.

Central to this approach is the proactive management of component risk. Altium Agile Teams provides a centralized view of component lifecycle status, integrated directly with data from SiliconExpert and Z2Data. When a part suddenly goes end-of-life, the urgent question is which projects and board revisions are impacted. Altium Agile Teams turns this once-tedious process into a simple, instant query, enabling teams to identify immediately which projects are impacted and select new parts before production grinds to a halt.

Conclusions

The software industry has led the world in the sophistication of the tooling and the collaborative apps built on millions of hard-earned lessons in managing complex projects. Now the same approach that made the software revolution possible is being made accessible to hardware development teams, bringing streamlined hardware project management, reduced design risks, and faster time-to-market.

Whether you’re a mid-sized team or a large R&D department spread across multiple time zones, Altium Agile Teams provides all of the tools to manage your electronic libraries, share designs, and collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders. 

Learn more about Altium Agile Teams →

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the primary challenges in hardware project management?

Hardware engineering faces unique challenges due to physical dependencies, external supply chain constraints, and the high cost of errors, which are more severe than in software.

How does the hardware design process differ from software development?

Hardware lacks the automated workflows common in software, relies on manual versioning and communication, and faces higher stakes because physical errors are much more expensive and difficult to fix than software bugs.

Why do physical dependencies create complications in hardware design?

Unlike software, which consists of abstract functions with well-defined interfaces, hardware has hundreds of hidden physical dependencies. For example, moving a part can trigger a chain reaction of PCB layout, thermal, and mechanical changes.

What are the external constraints that hardware teams typically face?

Hardware teams are constrained by component lead times, logistics, EMS availability, the time required to design test fixtures or tool up for PCB fabrication, part cost, and sourcing requirements.