DAVID G. ULLMAN PhD.

Dr. David Ullman is the father of the Robust Decision methodology, an expert on product development, an entertaining speaker and an experienced facilitator. His unique history of professional practice, teaching, facilitation and research enables him to balance practical experience with theory, much of it developed by him. The breath and depth of David's experience and education makes it possible for him to unstick complex situations, facilitate resolution, and help cross-organizational teams reach decisions and move to action.

Based on his product development research, David realized that business and technical progress is "the evolution of information punctuated by decisions". With decision making as the key, he spent over ten years developing Robust Decision methods designed to help teams make the best possible choices when information is uncertain, incomplete, evolving and conflicting. These state-of-the-art methods are described in his recent book Making Robust Decisions.

Robust Decision methods are a mix of traditional best practices fused with methods that Ullman developed and patented. With these, David can help an organization:

• Understand and agree on the problems that need to be resolved
• Choose the most critical issues
• Organize and manage the potential solutions to a problem
• Understand, measure and manage the uncertainty that underlies problems
• Manage both the soft information (opinions and gut-feel) and the hard data
• Address the differences of opinion about what is important to the stakeholders
• Determine the risks in each alternative
• Determine what-to-do-next, the cost/benefit of next steps to ensure the best possible choice is being made

Robust Decisions result in time and cost savings, customer and cross-organizational buy-in, and decisions that you feel good about in the morning.

David's decision assistance has ranged from simply shadowing teams to identifying the processes used during their deliberations, to full facilitation. He can help organizations reach Robust Decisions in virtually any domain as his customers bring the knowledge and David manages the process. Supporting this is David's breath of experience in hardware, software and business development. Additionally, he trains others in the methods and he can supply interactive distributed computer tools to support distributed teams. Applications that can benefit from Robust Decisions include:

• Business issues
• Vendor selection
• Portfolio assessment
• Proposal evaluation
• Product differentiation
• Choosing a new plant location
• Choosing a new employee
• Technology issues
• Make/buy decisions
• Technology readiness assessment
• Architecture selection
• Concept selection
• Design decisions
• Trade study management
• Military issues
• Choosing the best Course of Action
• Acquisition decision

David has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, a Masters in Aerospace Engineering and is a certified Taguchi Expert. He is founder of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) - Design Theory and Methodology Committee. Because of this and other contributions he has been awarded the honor of ASME Fellow. He holds five patents for both hardware and decision support algorithms. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering Design from Oregon State University and has been a visiting Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Twente University (Netherlands) and Cambridge University (UK).

He is the author of The Mechanical Design Process, a text used at many universities. He is currently working on the 4^th edition of this compendium of product design process best practices. This text was the first to weave all the best practices into a continuous process. To keep this text current, David is expert in most product design best practices including, Taguchi's method of design of experiments, quality function deployment, design for six sigma, failure analysis and others.

He has founded two corporations to commercialize his ideas. The first company manufactured personal transportation products, grew to have seven digit annual sales, and became the largest manufacturer in its field. David served as CEO over the first years of the corporation and as chairman of the board for life of the organization. The products David designed for this company won national awards.

The second corporation Ullman founded develops software, training and facilitation material around his Robust Decisions concept. Robust Decision methods have been taught and facilitated in major Fortune 500 Corporations and have led to improved decision making across many domains. He serves as CEO of this organization.

David has been consulting for over twenty years. Recent experience includes:

• Facilitated a hands-on problem-solving workshop at a Fortune 100 company. A human resources problem had gone unresolved for three years. During the sessions the problem was reformulated, evaluated and a course of action rapidly chosen that had buy-in from the entire team. This series of sessions not only helped the organization resolve a stuck issue, it trained the participants to utilize the Robust Decision methods in future problems. He is a regular teacher of Robust Decision courses at this corporation.
• Facilitated a government team of experts choosing the best proposal for eight digit funding. Typically, when choosing a new technology to fund, the organization mobilizes a distributed team of domain experts. David showed them how to cut significant cost and time from this decision-making process.
• Developed a decision support methodology for processing national intelligence information. Funded internally by a major military/security supplier, this extension of Robust Decision methods offered them the first system that supports intelligence agents reaching critical decisions about national security issues while taking into account the uncertainty that clouds all intelligence work.
• Partnered with a major military contractor to propose tools that support air traffic controllers reaching rapid decisions critical to managing military airspaces.
• Assisted a government research laboratory in understanding why their project planning estimates were so inaccurate and suggesting methods to improve them. This lab develops multi-million dollar satellites pushing the edges of technology. Some of these projects come in over three times the initial budget estimates. An effort to understand the causes and remedies of this resulted in suggestions that required fundamental system changes. These results also led to Chapter 3 and other sections of Making Robust Decisions.
• Supplied software to a rocket engine manufacturer to assist them in choosing the best possible rocket engine to propose for funding. Their proposal was successful and they won the support.
• Advised a CAD company on the strength and weaknesses of computer aided design offerings in preparation for the development of a new product.
• Facilitated a team of senior managers choosing new product development directions. From the portfolio of ideas that had been discussed, aided them in choosing which to develop with buy-in and risk awareness.
• Advised an author on how to publish his latest book. He had been successful using traditional publishers, but wanted to explore other options such as e-books, publish-on-demand and self-publishing.
• Advised a small company about which products to develop from a portfolio of ideas. The product chosen with the process proved revolutionary.

David has taught hundreds of courses in his career, both in industry and academia:

• David has taught the Robust Decision courses "Resolution Basics" and "Resolution Facilitation" recently at: Hewlett Packard, Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Harley Davidson.
• David has taught product design processes to over 1000 university students and hundreds of industry professionals at Lucent, Cummins, Sequent, Comfortex, Schlumberger, Metronic, Tektronix, Mentor Graphics, Novellus, and Freightliner.