‘Every technical problem has a social component.’

A True Story

A big market is forming.

Phase 2 of the product is being considered. Opinions differ on topologies and technologies. Tempers are brewing and wheels are spinning. The High Priced Help are becoming impatient and strident - GET IT DONE!.

Two groups of twenty people each are rapidly assembled, one in Europe the other in North America - component and materials specialists, designers, manufacturers, procurement experts, marketing, sales and a lone installer.

For two days each, the two groups play, goad each other, argue, shout, laugh, talk, draw, sketch, download, think and create. At the end of the two days both groups have prepared a likely Bill of Material, rough manufacturing costs, margins, customer lifecycle ownership costs and installation options.

The European and NA spreadsheets are compared and aligned.

The original plans for Phase 2 are found to be 5 to 6 times more expensive than the final choice.

Total elapsed time- two weeks.

True story.

Welcome to Design Fest; a surprisingly simple technique for pulling together a widely cross functional team of individuals who, taken together, have expertise in almost every aspect of a new product's life and can caress it at its inception.

 

The Theory Behind the Practice.

The Defense Systems Management College in Fort Belvoir Virginia is in the business of procuring product for the US armed forces. Their studies show (1) that 80% of the Total Life Cycle cost can be attributed to decisions made at the 'messy front end' of product and supply chain definition.

'Design Fest' seeks to increase the value to the buyer without impacting Time to Market or margins.

There are many aspects to product cost. Things like component cost and availability, manufacturability, yield, installation, repair, field upgrades, procurement, experience curves, competitive pressures, and others all play their part.

Each of these aspects is a discipline in its own right. Each discipline, if not considered appropriately, can hobble a product's market acceptance and success. It can easily become a mess.

The time to influence a product's value is earlier rather than later. It's a fact of life that a product's cost structure is difficult to influence late in the design process. Products are MD (Manufacture to be Discontinued) sooner. Designers are as scarce as 'rocking horse doodoo'. Career development dictates that an ambitious designer work on new, cool stuff. Marketing managers when faced with the tradeoff between new cool features and reduced product cost ¨ embrace the one and give lip service to the other. The system powerfully reinforces the stutus quo.

Can anything be done? Yes.

Surprisingly, there have been advances in the behavioural sciences over the past twenty years that can be usefully applied to the issue of product development.

These advances can be lumped under the heading of 'Decision making in uncertain environments'. This is simply decision making that involves a multi-disciplinary group, where any single individual's knowledge does not cover the full domain of the situation and where the decision process can be upset by politics, differing personal beliefs, looseness of language, and the overall complexity of the situation.

Design Fest incorporates all of these advances into a specially designed event that brings together ALL of the subject matter experts and power-brokers early in the design phase. Their brief is to conciously optimise functionality, cost and any other relevant business parameters at the outset of a project and to do it RAPIDLY. Just like our story.

Is this method perfect? No. God had a sense of humour. New information will arrive too late to influence the design. Clients will change their preferences. Sales will sell vapour and engineering will have to fix it. Sometimes the individuals are unproductively contrary and refuse to make reasonable tradeoff calls. But all-in-all it's a pretty useful technique ¨ and its fun.