Monday, February 13, 2012

Prototypes, ambiguity, and tradespace exploration

I ran across an HBR story about how single prototypes that happen early in the system or product development cycle can project outcomes.  This is reported to happen because the team becomes focused on the single prototype instead of remaining in the problem space for a longer period of time.

Tradespace exploration, and in particular tradespace exploration rooted in what is valuable to the acquirer or customer, could be one counter measure to this team dynamic.  By exploring hundreds or thousands of designs parametrically is one way to avoid settling on optimizing one solution too early in the development process.  Further, by mapping to stakeholder utility it keeps the development team focused in the customers problem domain.

May particular research in this area is two fold:
1.  Use of multi-attribute tradespace exploration for systems solutions in the competitive commercial space with many sellers competing for many consumers (the current research has been primarily in the context of a monopsony, such as the U.S. Department of Defense or NASA).
2.  The use of tradespace exploration to as a value centric approach to target system modularization efforts.

As I get articles out on each of these areas I'll provide additional pointers.

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