Learn: Product Design and Project Management: Requirements, Scheduling, TRIZ, and Finance

What is a project?

A temporary effort to produce a unique result under defined constraints.

What determines project success?

Meeting customer requirements while managing scope, schedule, cost, and quality.

What is the critical path?

The longest-duration dependency path; it determines minimum project duration.

What is slack on a critical-path activity?

Zero; a delay delays project completion unless the plan changes.

How is earliest start (ES) calculated?

Maximum earliest finish of all immediate predecessors.

How is earliest finish (EF) calculated?

EF = ES + activity duration.

When may an activity with no predecessors start?

Time zero, unless another start constraint is given.

If a task has two predecessors, when may it start?

When both finish; use the later predecessor finish time.

What does a Gantt chart display?

Activities against time, including timing, duration, and dependencies.

What is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?

Decomposition of a project into deliverables and work packages.

WBS versus Gantt chart?

WBS defines what work exists; Gantt shows timing and sequencing.

What is a customer requirement?

A need or desired outcome expressed from the customer's perspective.

What is an engineering requirement?

A measurable, verifiable technical interpretation of a customer need.

How should a derived requirement be worded?

The product shall + measurable criterion + acceptance target.

Convert lightweight into an engineering requirement.

Device mass shall not exceed a specified number of grams.

Convert long battery life into an engineering requirement.

Device shall operate at least a specified number of hours per charge.

What is a mandatory requirement?

A nonnegotiable requirement that must be met for acceptance.

What is a tradeoff requirement?

A desirable criterion that can be balanced against other objectives.

What is a Product Design Specification (PDS)?

A formal set of measurable requirements guiding and evaluating the design.

What is a stakeholder?

Anyone who can affect or is affected by a project or its results.

Is every stakeholder a customer?

No. Customers are a subset of stakeholders.

What is a Pareto chart?

Categories in descending frequency with a cumulative-percentage line.

How do you calculate cumulative Pareto percentage?

Cumulative frequency / total frequency × 100.

List product-development phases in order.

Planning → concept → system-level → detail → testing/refinement → production ramp-up.

When is the project plan reviewed?

At the end of planning.

When is the conceptual design reviewed?

At the end of concept development.

When is the detail design reviewed?

At the end of detail design.

Why is design iterative?

Analysis, tests, and feedback reveal issues requiring refinement.

How do you preserve quality after resources decrease?

Reduce project scope or extend the schedule.

What is cost committed?

Future spending effectively determined by current design choices.

What is cost incurred?

Money actually spent to date.

Why is conceptual design important for cost?

Early design decisions lock in much of the eventual total cost.

What does a black-box function diagram show?

A function transforming input flows into output flows without internal details.

What are the three types of functional flows?

Energy, material, and signal.

In a dishwasher diagram, is electricity a component or flow?

An energy flow; a motor would be a component.

What does TRIZ stand for?

Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.

What are two core TRIZ ideas?

Similar problems have been solved; resolve contradictions rather than accept them.

How does a TRIZ contradiction matrix work?

Match improving and worsening parameters to suggested inventive principles.

How many standard TRIZ parameters and principles exist?

39 engineering parameters and 40 inventive principles.

Name the three Kano categories.

Basic needs, performance needs, and delighters.

What is Kano feature migration?

Delighters become performance needs and eventually basic expectations.

What is a patent's principal legal right?

The right to exclude others from certain acts involving the claimed invention.

What three criteria are central to patentability?

Novel, useful, and non-obvious.

What order are conceptual, embodiment, and detail design?

Conceptual → embodiment → detail.

What is a programmed decision?

A recurring decision made using an established rule or procedure.

What is a non-programmed decision?

A novel, unstructured decision requiring judgment.

Name two non-TRIZ ideation methods.

Random-word association and worst-possible-idea brainstorming.

What is the compound-interest future value formula?

F = P(1 + i)^n.

What is the compound-interest present value formula?

P = F / (1 + i)^n.

What formula gives years needed to grow P into F?

n = ln(F/P) / ln(1 + i).

Project Management Triangle

A visual model illustrating the fundamental interdependent constraints governing every engineering project: Time, Cost, and Scope.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

A foundational project planning tool that takes a complex, large-scale project and decomposes it into smaller, manageable phases and work packages.

Responsibility Matrix

A planning tool used to ensure that tasks are balanced equitably among all team members over the project duration, preventing any individual from becoming overburdened.

Gantt Chart

A horizontal bar chart schedule that illustrates time and task precedence, simultaneously displaying the WBS, task list, and assigned team members.

Patent

A government grant that does not bestow an affirmative right to produce an invention, but legally empowers the patent holder to exclude others from making, using, or selling it. Front pages utilize standardized INID codes to denote bibliographic details.

Pareto Chart

A quality control visualization comprising a bar graph sorted in descending frequency order and a cumulative percentage line graph, illustrating the principle that approximately $80\%$ of defects stem from $20\%$ of causes.

Ishikawa Diagram

A cause-and-effect fishbone diagram where primary manufacturing categories form main ribs and specific process variables branch off them, illustrating how causes flow downstream to produce product defects.

Product Development Process (Stage-Gate)

A structured development framework consisting of six sequential phases: Phase 0 (Planning), Phase 1 (Concept Development), Phase 2 (System-Level Design), Phase 3 (Detail Design), Phase 4 (Testing and Refinement), and Phase 5 (Production Ramp-Up).

TRIZ

A systematic theory of inventive problem solving based on extensive patent analysis, utilizing inventive principles and a contradiction matrix correlating improving and worsening engineering features.

Engineering Economics

The application of engineering or mathematical tools in the quantitative analysis of the economics of engineering alternatives to evaluate and predict future financial performance.

Parametric Cost Estimating

The least accurate cost estimating method, applied in early planning and concept design, which relies on high-level system parameters and includes contingencies for long-term forecasting.

Estimating by Use of Analogy

A cost estimation technique that scales past historical cost data from similar programs or technologies, commonly applied when initiating new product lines or preliminary designs.

The Engineering Estimate

The most detailed and accurate cost estimating method, which calculates expenses for every individual part, labor step, and standard factor of a design, frequently used in detail design and construction bids.

Time Value of Money (TVM)

The fundamental economic principle that money available at the present time is worth more than the identical sum in the future due to its potential earning capacity.

Simple Interest

An interest calculation accrued strictly on the original principal amount, calculated using $I = P \times n \times i$, where $P$ is principal, $n$ is the number of periods, and $i$ is the interest rate.

Compound Interest

Interest calculated on the initial principal and on all accumulated interest from prior periods, governed by the future value formula $F = P(1 + i)^n$.

Economic Equivalence

The condition where different cash sums occurring at different points in time have identical economic value when converted at a specific interest rate or rate of return $i$.

Minimum Attractive Rate of Return (MARR)

The minimum hurdle or benchmark interest rate established by a firm's financial management below which an engineering investment proposal will not be funded.

Opportunity Cost

The rate of return of the most profitable project rejected or forgone due to a firm's capital budget constraints.

Fixed Costs vs. Variable Costs

Fixed costs remain constant regardless of production output (e.g., taxes, insurance, building depreciation), whereas variable costs fluctuate directly with the volume of units produced (e.g., materials, direct labor).

Marginal Cost

The additional expense required to produce one single additional unit of output, which must remain lower than the marginal revenue generated for production expansion to be economically viable.

Sunk Cost

A past financial expenditure that has already occurred and cannot be recovered or altered by any future decision, making it irrelevant to prospective economic evaluations.

Asset Life-Cycle Cost

The total economic expense of an asset across its lifespan, where the optimal economic life occurs at the minimum point of average total cost (the sum of decreasing average capital cost and increasing average maintenance cost).

Requirement

A formal statement defining a capability, performance characteristic, or function needed by a product or service to satisfy customer needs.

Functional Requirement

A technical specification that defines what, how well, and under what conditions one or more inputs must be converted into outputs across a designated system boundary.

Stakeholder

Any individual, group, or institution that has an interest in a system or receives benefit from it, encompassing users, operators, bill payers, owners, regulators, sponsors, maintenance crews, and victims.

Customer Requirements vs. Derived Requirements

Customer requirements represent nontechnical statements expressed in the customer's natural vocabulary, whereas derived (technical/engineering) requirements mathematically translate those needs into engineering terms for design implementation.

Mandatory Requirements vs. Tradeoff Requirements

Mandatory requirements are non-negotiable constraints that must be fulfilled (e.g., legal compliance), whereas tradeoff requirements represent desirable capabilities evaluated using multi-criterion decision methods where alternatives improve some metrics while compromising others.

Delighters (Kano Model)

Product innovations and features that customers did not know they wanted that generate high satisfaction, but gradually degrade over time into standard basic expectations.

Legacy Requirements

Often-unstated design constraints imposed by previous generations of systems, including ruggedness standards or backward compatibility requirements with existing systems (e.g., COBOL software).

Committed Manufacturing Cost

The cumulative percentage of total product manufacturing cost predetermined early in the design process, with approximately $85\%$ committed by the conclusion of the concept and prototyping phases.

Design Influence on Product Cost

The cost influence relationship where engineering design accounts for only $5\%$ of actual expenditure but directly determines $70\%$ of total overall product manufacturing cost.

Front-Loaded Engineering Changes

The design strategy of processing engineering design changes early in the development lifecycle prior to production startup (Job #1), characteristic of Japanese manufacturing, rather than sustaining high change volume late in the cycle.

Routine (Programmed) Decision

A repetitive, well-structured decision addressing standard problems by following clear, predetermined rules, standard procedures, or software at lower organizational levels.

Innovative (Non-Programmed) Decision

A unique, ill-structured decision made at executive or upper organizational levels addressing novel, ambiguous challenges that necessitate creative brainstorming and radical alternatives.

Anchoring

A cognitive decision-making trap where an evaluator unconsciously places disproportionate weight on the first piece of information received.

Psychological Set

A cognitive bias characterized by the tendency to rely rigidly on a habitual strategy or approach when attempting to solve a new engineering problem.

Pugh Method

An iterative concept evaluation matrix comparing generated concepts against a designated baseline datum using a three-level scoring scheme: $+$ (better), $-$ (worse), and $S$ (same).

Datum (Pugh Method)

The reference benchmark or best existing concept against which all competing candidate design concepts are comparatively scored in a Pugh evaluation matrix.

Nominal Group Technique

A structured group decision process where participants independently generate and contribute individual ideas, privately rank them, and sum the numeric rankings to establish an unbiased consensus.

Delphi Technique

A decision-making methodology querying an external panel of industry experts via iterative questionnaires curated by an in-house coordinator, allowing experts to participate without ever meeting directly.

Groupthink

A pathological team dynamic in cohesive groups where members prioritize consensus over critical evaluation, suppress dissenting opinions, ignore warning signs, and fail to scrutinize alternatives.

Design Concept

A purposefully vague, abstract embodiment of an idea that defines its core physical principles, material class, working surfaces, motions, and geometry without specifying exact dimensions.

Physical Principle

The fundamental natural law or scientific phenomenon by which an engineering effect is produced (e.g., Coulomb friction, Hooke's law, fluid friction, Archimedes' principle).

Working Principle

The abstract synthesis of a design concept showing its intended motion, planar contact surfaces, material state, and governing physical principle without defining specific component sizes.

Activity Analysis Method

A functional clarification process that systematically traces every step of customer-product interaction across the entire lifecycle, categorized into Setup, Daily use, Maintenance, and Retire/Disposal.

Function Decomposition Diagram

A hierarchical diagrammatic technique that breaks a high-level primary product function into smaller subfunctions, disconnecting function from form and enabling concept synthesis.

Function Structure Diagram

A systems modeling diagram illustrating the conversion of energy, material, and signal flows across a defined system boundary from an initial State 1 to a transformed State 2.

Morphological Matrix

A systematic ideation grid displaying product subfunctions in rows and alternative concept mechanisms in columns, enabling the exploration of distinct combinatorial design paths.

Universal Design

A human-centered design approach based on 7 core principles aimed at creating products and environments usable by the broadest possible spectrum of people without requiring specialized adaptation.