Executive summary: Team Members:

142 CHAPTER 5 Planning for Design MicroSoft Project TM . Software that supports the planning activity. There are many share-ware versions available. For details on the Design Structure Matrix see The DSM Website at MIT, http:www.dsmweb. org. A tutorial there is instructive. The Design Report format is used, with permission, from the Electrical Engineering Program at The Milwaukee School of Engineering. 5.9 EXERCISES 5.1 Develop a plan for the original or redesign problem identified in Exercise 4.1 or 4.2. a. Identify the participants on the design team. b. Identify and state the objective for each needed task. c. Identify the deliverables. d. Justify the use of prototypes. e. Estimate the resources needed for each task. f. Develop a schedule and a cost estimate for the design project.

5.2 For the features of the redesign problem Exercise 4.2 develop a plan as in Exercise 5.1.

5.3 Develop a plan for making a breakfast consisting of toast, coffee, a fried egg, and juice. Be

sure to state the objective of each task in terms of the results of the activities performed, not in terms of the activities themselves.

5.4 Develop a plan to design an orange ripeness tester. In a market, people test the freshness

of oranges by squeezing them, and based on their experience, how much they compress when squeezed gives an indication of ripeness. There are some sophisticated methods used in industry, but the goal here is to develop something simple, that could be built for low cost. 5.10 ON THE WEB Templates for the following documents are available on the book’s website: www.mhhe.comUllman4e ■ Project Plan ■ Design Report 6 C H A P T E R Understanding the Problem and the Development of Engineering Specifications KEY QUESTIONS ■ Why emphasize developing engineering specifications? ■ How can you identify the “customers” for a product? ■ Why is it so important to understand the voice of the customer and work to translate this into engineering specifications? ■ How can you best benchmark the competition to understand design and business opportunities? ■ How can you justify taking time at the beginning of a project to do specification development instead of developing concepts immediately? 6.1 INTRODUCTION Understanding the design problem is an essential foundation for designing a qual- ity product. “Understanding the design problem” means to translate customers’ requirements into a technical description of what needs to be designed. Or, as the Japanese say, “Listen to the voice of the customer.” This importance is made graphically clear in the cartoon shown in Fig. 6.1. Everyone has a different view of what is needed by the customer and it takes work to find out what this really is. Surveys show that poor product definition is a factor in 80 of all time- to-market delays. Further, getting a product to market late is more costly to a company than being over cost or having less than optimal performance. Finding the “right” problem to be solved may seem a simple task; unfortunately, often it is not. Besides finding the right problem to solve, an even more difficult and expen- sive problem for most companies is what is often called “creeping specifications.” 143