This packet contains material to help you assess and improve the state of concurrent product development in your organization. The material is divided into five main categories of assessment: Organization, Communication, Requirements Development, Product Development and MFG Process Development. Each of these five categories are further divided into sub-categories for a total of eighteen key areas of concurrent assessment. Each of these eighteen key areas begins with the Foci, the important criteria to measure within the area. This is followed by a series of questions titled How to Measure. These questions are to be applied to your organization using the assessment form. The questions are designed to measure the both what is known and what is actually done within your organization. They are divided into four levels of problem solving activity. These levels will be defined on the next page. Details on these measures can be found in the literature with many detailed in The Mechanical Design Process, McGraw Hill, 1992, by the author..
Care should be taken during the assessment and subsequent planning for improvement as it is not sufficient to preach the concurrent design philosophy, it must be practiced to have results.
Each of the eighteen assessments is divided along four possible levels of problem solving activity in a company: task, project, program and enterprise. Many large companies utilize all four levels during product development. However, in most medium or small companies some of these levels are combined. In reading through the definitions below, decide how many levels you will use in assessing your organization. Combine the questions from levels you are not considering into those for the next level. For example, if there is no clear "program" level in your company then "progra m" assessment questions should be combined with those in "enterprise." Try to be consistent.
The following definitions should help you decide how to divide your organization:
Task : Tasks refer to problem solving by one or a very few individuals focused on a single problem. If your product only has one major unit and only requires one or a few individuals to develop it, then most of your problem solving effort is at the task level.
Project : If your product requires a team of individuals who are in the same engineering discipline, then problem solving requires action on the project level. Sub-problems within the single-discipline project teams are solved on the task level.
Program : If your product requires separate engineering disciplines for different systems, then some problem solving is at the program level. Each system may need its own single-discipline project team. Representatives from these project teams form a mixed-discipline program team to manage the overall product development.
Enterprise : All the lower levels of problem solving combine to form the company- wide enterprise level. Here, the entire company (program teams supported by project teams supported by tasks), its vendors and customers are combined in the product development effort.