Question

"Accelerating the Design-Build-Test Cycle for Effective New Product Development" discusses the competitive advantages a firm may gain by developing high quality products rapidly, which includes market shares and margins. This may be done by accelerating the iterative design-test-build cycle, as well as limiting the number of cycles needed, by appropriate communication channels and advanced design tools. Four models of communication are; Serial/Batch, Early Start in the Dark, Early Involvement, and Integrated Problem Solving. The choices firms make regarding communication between upstream and downstream groups and how to link the actual work in time shapes the nature of cross-functional integration of the development process and the success of the project. Give an example of a product development project that would be suited for each of these communication models. Also consider documentation costs. Consider that, though necessary communication of utmost importance, unnecessary communication is a waste of resources.

Questions

What are advantages due to developing high quality products rapidly for a firm?

What is meant by ‘framing the problem’?

What can be done to minimize the number of design-build-test cycles?

Which model of communication requires the least resources?

Which model of communication may result in more costly mistakes?

Answer 1

1. Advantages:

• Realizing the Design Concepts, look and feel of the design, take ahead ideas and implement them in the design prior to finalization
• Saving Cost and Time in developing prototypes
• ability to develop customized products as per the individual requirement
• ability to identify flaws in the design prior to any production

2. Framing is a proper way of structuring or presenting a problem/ issue. It acts as below:

• What is the issue?
• Who is involved?
• What contributes to the problem?
• What contributes to the solution?

3. Minimize the number of design-build-test cycles:

• reduce the waiting time
• when Hand-offs do fast Task Switching, save time in realigning key information, familiarization, and reworking
• avoid any extra processes, well evaluate before being blindly following
• Better to focus only on useful features. Avoid too extra features to unnecessarily incorporate
• Avoid time wasting in defects reporting and fixing leads and so cost penalties

4. Batch processing model of communication requires the least resources because:

• It provides flexibility to shift the time of job processing even when the computing resources are less busy
• Optimization- It avoids idling the computing resources with minute-by-minute manual intervention and supervision