Question

1.Explain how agility can be incorporated into engineered products / systems. 5 marks

2.Discuss the process whereby requirements in the RBS are allocated to the physical architecture.

(Questions from System science and engineering)

Answer 1

1.Explain how agility can be incorporated into engineered products or systems:

The product developing organization, which is responsible for providing the product to the market, is generally surrounded by numerous stakeholders including the customer whose desires and expectations ultimately need to be satisfied. However, meeting the customer requirements has become a very challenging endeavour in today’s turbulent market situation. Product development is usually carried out as a project which has to be well managed, not exceed a previously defined budget, and be run within a limited time frame. During this time frame, unexpected project changes might appear and challenge the product development team. Being responsive to these changes can be crucial for the product development project’s success.

In the year 2016 scientists conducted a comprehensive literature review and frame semantic analysis to find a complete definition of the “agility” construct. The results defined agility as “a project team’s ability to rapidly change the project plan as a response to customer or stakeholder needs, market or technology demands in order to achieve better project or product performance in an innovative and dynamic project environment” (Conforto et al., 2016, p. 667). Transferred to the world of product development, agility thus can be described as the capability to discover and understand changing product requirements, and being able to quickly consider these changes while making progress in developing the product. This capability requires a good level of perception towards the project’s stakeholders and on the other side high decision-making speed when the team discovers potential product changes and needs to decide whether they should be executed or not

In other words, the agility of a product development team describes how well it is dealing with uncertainties in terms of possible product changes which nowadays have become hidden risk in many product development projects.

2.Discuss the process whereby requirements in the Resouce Breakdown Structure are allocated to the physical architecture:

There are many aspects to planning a project. They likely to revolve around the triple constraint of time, cost and scope. One such orbit is resources. Resources can be affected by all three of those constraints and therefore require a method to control them sometimes even a resource management software.

Resources is a big term, of course, and expresses to not only materials and equipment used in a project, but the human resources. In fact, those people who construct your project team are in many ways the most important resource. They are, after all, the ones who will execute the project and chaperon it from start to finish.

In project management, the resource breakdown structure (RBS) is a tool or mechanism to help with planning and controlling project work. Think of it as a work breakdown structure (WBS) for your resources, because that’s what it is, and it’s just as valuable.

In terms of format, the RBS is like the WBS, and requires an estimation of which resources will be needed for each task in the project. Therefore, the task list is essential for collecting the necessary resources.

But a project manager will naturally lookout for input from a wide variety of sources; these include the schedule, risk register, cost estimates and other organizational processes. This allows a project manager to fully gather all the resources that will be needed to execute the project.

The RBS is commonly created as a tree diagram. At the top is the project’s final output or product, under which are the breakdown of resources, each in an individual branch below the overall project heading. These branches are the resource types, such as the area where the project is taking place, the equipment being used and the team that’s executing the project.