Due at 9:00 PM on Wednesday, March 21
Purpose
The Conceptual Design Progress Report summarizes the state of your design at the end of Winter Term. Ideally, your group has a conceptual design ready to present to your sponsor. This report will be sent to your sponsor as background for a design review that will be completed by the end of the first week of Spring Term.
The Conceptual Design Progress Report combines the Concept Analysis Report with information about customer requirements, performance metrics, and deliverables from the Project Contract. The Conceptual Design Progress Report should contain updated information from those prior reports.
Format
The Progress Report should have these sections
- Title page
- Executive summary
- Primary and secondary client/market requirements
- System level performance metrics and requirements matrix
- System (or project) architecture
- Analysis of all major subsystems with conclusion about conceptual design
- Plan for work to be completed in Spring Term, and a list of deliverables for the project.
- Conclusion
Items 3, 4, 5 and 6 contain updated material from previous reports. Do not merely submit the old versions. Show your progress and make corrections based on feedback.
The Progress Report should be a single document with 8 to 12 pages of text (tables and figures are not part of the page count) for sections 3 through 6. There is no page limit for the Appendix, which should be used for supporting documentation such as design calculations, CAD models, and prototype test data. In the body of your report, be sure to include references and summaries of results in the body of your report. Information provided in the appendix, but not discussed in the body of the report will be ignored.
The goal is not to fill pages. The goals are to provide a concise and complete description of the current state of your design, and to rigorously document the key decisions that lead to the current status of the design.
You can download the rubric as a spreadsheet or PDF file.
The rest of this web page describes the required components of the report
1. Title page
Your report should have a title page that lists the project name, sponsor name, team members, course (ME 492), and due date. The title page should be a separate sheet.
2. Executive Summary
The Executive Summary is a single page containing this information
- Project Objective Statement
- Current status and major achievements during Winter Term 2018
- A list of milestones for the coming term: What has to happen by When for the rest of the project.
Using the format and style described in the textbook by Mattson and Sorenson, give a one-sentence project objective statement. See pp. 272-273 in the 4th edition, or pp. 296-297 in the 5th edition.
A knowledgeable reader, e.g. your sponsor, your faculty coach, or an expert in the technology of your project, should be able to read the Executive Summary and have a clear idea of the concrete achievements of your group during Winter. Be specific, precise and brief. The body of your report provides clear and compelling evidence for claims of achievement made in the Executive Summary. It would be good to ask your faculty coach to read and give feedback on your Executive Summary.
The list of milestones should be 3 to 5 major events that will occur during Spring term. A milestone has a date (one day) and short name like "design review". A milestone is not a deliverable. Tasks lead to achievement of milestones, but a milestone is not a task.
3. Primary and secondary client/market requirements
Your project should have 5 to 10 primary requirements that are written in the voice of the customer. Review the supplemental notes on decision making with special attention to the Goal Pyramid. The primary requirements should mostly be key requirements (as appearing in the Goal Pyramid).
List primary and secondary client requirements, with the secondary requirements as sub-items under the primary requirements. Give a numerical importance level for each of the primary client requirements. Those importance levels should appear, along with the primary client requirements, along the left border of the requirements matrix (see next section).
4. System level performance metrics and requirements matrix
Refer to the ME 491 notes and the textbook for information on the purpose and format of the requirements matrix.
Each primary client requirement should have at least one performance metric, and preferably two to four performance metrics. All quantitative performance metrics should have units, a target value, and upper and lower acceptable limits.
The primary client/market requirements from the Project Contract may have been refined, but should not have changed too much. However, the performance metrics used to guide the design process are likely to have changed as your conceptual design has evolved. Your understanding of how to measure performance (the metrics) and what is feasible (your target values and limits for the metrics) should have evolved as you developed your design.
5. System (or project) architecture
Describe the system-level architecture of your design solution. As part of your system-level description, include at least one diagram that shows an overview of your project or device. Provide a brief (one paragraph or so) narrative describing this diagram. Consider a block diagram or functional decomposition as your system-level diagram. Describe the purpose or function of each major subsystem.
6. Analysis of All Major Subsystems
This is the most important section of the report. Your conceptual design decisions should be supported by evidence that justifies further investment in your project. With the information presented in this section, your sponsor should have confidence that your team will be able to deliver a final design that satisfies the client/market requirements.
By the end of Winter Term, your team should have a large body of conceptual design artifacts: notes from client market interviews, lists of client priorities, sketches, CAD models, extensive documentation from external searches, several lists of ideas from brainstorming, simple prototype models, iterated lists of performance metrics, test data from experiments to validate ideas, engineering analysis of concepts, screening and scoring matrices, requirements matrices, etc. The challenge is to summarize that information into a compelling case for your chosen conceptual design.
For each subsystem, present a schematic or CAD model that illustrate the major components and how those components contribute to the overal system. Provide evidence, in the form of design calculations, screening and scoring matrices, and benchmarking with existing methods of addressing the design problem. The body of your report should have the key drawings, tables, and plots from models of your design. Use the Appendix for details.
7. Plan for Work to be Completed
List and describe the major tasks to be completed in Spring Term. Present a Gantt chart that shows duration and sequence of major tasks. Describe any critical sequential dependencies in the work plan, and provide guidance on how you will address slippage of the schedule in any critical path through sequentially dependent tasks.
8. Conclusion
Briefly summarize the status of your conceptual design. Consider some of these questions:
- Is your design capable of being completed with the budget provided by the sponsor? Are there decisions about the scope of the project to be made with the sponsor in order to fit the final design prototype within the budget?
- What are the crucial challenges to completing this project on time and within budget. The purpose is not to simply list the challenges, but instead, give the sponsor an idea of what obstacles lie ahead, and how your team is going to address those obstacles.
- What critical decisions does the sponsor need to make so that the group can proceed with the final design and development?
List the deliverables your group will provide to the client in June 2018.
Appendix
Use the Appendix of the report to provide detailed documentation that does not fit into the body your report. Examples include detailed modeling equations, data sheets, images of CAD models, and experimental data.
Expectations for Writing
The quality of the writing will count for 15 percent of the total score. Therefore, make sure you write clearly, use proper grammar and spelling, and use citations for all information not created by the group. Figures and tables should all have numbers and captions. Any information presented in tables, schematics or graphs needs to be explained in the text. Figures and tables that are not described in the text will be ignored. Equations should use symbols, not words, for variables. All physical quantities should have appropriate units.
Assume that the people reading this document are part of an organization that is familiar with and committed to, and counting on, your success. What the readers don't know is specifically how you are going to solve your given design problem. Put your effort into explaining your solution as clearly and completely as possible given the state of evolution of your design at this time.