Week 3 - Market Requirement Review & Project Planning

Learning Objectives

At the end of this week, students should be able to

  • Create product-focused requirement statements (from Customer/Client/Market needs)
  • Create a requirements matrix
  • Create a Work Breakdown Structure
  • Provide simple descriptions of a Gantt chart
  • Construct a Gantt Chart for their project.
  • Identify major deliverables for their project
  • List all requirements of the final version of the Project Contract

Announcements

  • Project Contract Assignment is due on Friday, 26 September. The project contract will also be sent to your sponsors for feedback.
  • Guidelines on report writing for Capstone) were created
  • Make an estimate of space needs for working on your project. I will collect that information next week and start making work bench assignments. Please be realistic.

Review of Client Requirements and Performance metrics

Identifying client requirements and performance metrics is part of the Opportunity Development phase.

Case study of fume extractor

Figure 1 is a photograph of a fume extractor that can be made from instructions at Make Magazine. There are many sizes and types of fume extractors, from the small bench-top style shown in Figure 1, to large wheeled devices suitable for use in welding.

Demonstration plot

Figure 1: DIY fume extractor from Make Magazine.

We created a fictitious market research project to demonstrate the process of converting customer interviews into a requirements matrix. The fume extractor case study assumes that we want to mass produce a small, bench-top fume extrator. We assume the product would be of interest to electronic technicians who do a lot of soldering work.

The results of different stages of refining the client requirements are in a spreadsheet. PDF images from tabs of the spreadsheet are also available in the set of following links:

Motivation for Project Planning

The need to plan should be obvious, but in practice engineering teams can try to rush to the good part, which means playing with their favorite tools.

How to make project planning useful

Project planning is useful, in Capstone and in "real life", when it involves

  • anticipating what is necessary to achieve goals; and
  • breaking larger task into manageable subtasks that are easier to understand and complete.

Anticipation of needs or problems is obviously important because

  • knowing time and resource costs of future activities gives us time to find those resources;
  • having a prediction of needs allows us to track progress, and make corrections along the way;
  • correcting problems early is almost always cheaper and more efficient than correcting problems later (the exception is when either a problem simply "goes away" or when the problem is misunderstood);

Since mistakes will happen and unexpected external influences will intervene, no plan is perfect. However, it is better to work with an imperfect plan than no plan at all. By seriously engaging planning, the design team should seek to avoid unnecessary, self-inflicted damage due to errors in scheduling or execution that could be predicted in advance.

In general, for any project, the cost of making changes increases as the project progresses. This is especially true as products approach manufacturing.

Accepting Uncertainty and Imprecision

Antonsson and Otto, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, vol. 117B, 1995, pp 25-32

One of the most critical problems in engineering design is making early decisions on a sound basis. However, the early stages of design are also the most uncertain, and obtaining precise information upon which to base decisions is usually impossible. The primary reason for this difficulty is that imprecision is an integral part of the engineering design process. Not imprecision in thought or logic, but rather the intrinsic vagueness of a preliminary, incomplete description.

There are formal methods for dealing with Uncertainty and Imprecision that we will not discuss now. The point for the moment is to recognize that planning itself is subject to uncertainty and imprecision. While we should strive to make the best plans within the time available, we also need to accept that planning cannot avoid all possible scheduling, resource and management problems. Again, that is not a reason to avoid planning.

Project Planning Tools

There are many resources on the Internet and in books. There are also many software versions of these tools. One general resource is the consulting web site Mindtools.

Work Breakdown Structure

The simplest planning activity is to write down all tasks that you anticipate you will need to complete in order to finish a project. When you have the list, then you can estimate the time it will take you to complete each task.

A work breakdown structure is created by listing the major tasks necessary to complete a project. Each major task is then divided into smaller tasks or steps. Each of those tasks is divided further until you have a list of tasks. Figure 2 is a WBS of the task of cleaning a room. This example is adapted from the book by Heagney

After listing tasks and subtasks, estimate the time necessary to complete each task. Figure 3 is the work breakdown structure for cleaning a room with time estimates for each task. You can download the spreadsheet version.

Work breakdown for cleaning a room

Figure 2: Work breakdown structure for cleaning a room. Adapted from Heagney, Fundamentals of Project Management

Download a larger version of the image

Work breakdown spreadsheet cleaning a room

Figure 3: Work breakdown structure for cleaning a room with time estimates.

Download a larger version of the image




WBS for Conceptual Design Tasks

Here are some sample tasks for a conceptual design of a Capstone project.

  • Internal search
    • Generate ideas from the team
    • Concept sketches
    • Mind maps
  • External search
    • Look for complete solutions as benchmarks
    • Look for components
    • Look for analogous problems and solutions
  • Functional decomposition
  • Models of concept performance
    • Overall power requirements
    • Maximum force
    • Size limits
    • Ballpark cost estimates (use benchmarks)
  • Concept evaluation
    • Screening of rough ideas
    • Refine/combine ideas
    • Scoring of ideas
    • Revise ideas (again) and finalize scoring
    • Choose a design concept
  • Design review
    • Prepare summary report
    • Prepare slides for presentation
    • Meet with sponsor
    • Debrief with team to finalize plans for next steps

The preceding list is generic and incomplete. You will need to fill in more details and account for tasks that are unique to your project. You will probably need to break down tasks another level

After you have listed all the tasks, estimate the time necessary to complete each task. Refine further if you do not have confidence in the time estimate.

Gantt Chart

A Gantt chart lists tasks on a timeline

  1. Use Work-breakdown structure to list tasks and identify time requirements
  2. Identify sequencing of tasks
    • Which tasks must be sequential and which tasks can be done in parallel?
    • Estimate uncertainty of each task
  3. Move tasks onto Gantt chart

Templates

As an alternative to stand-alone programs like Microsoft Project and a large number of on-line services, you can use an Excel template to create Gantt charts. Here is a sample of templates:

Mindtools has a recipe for creating a Gantt chart without using a particular software tool.

Gantter is a free, web-hosted project planning tool that integrates with Google Drive.

Figure 3 is a Gantt chart from a research project to support design a device to warm a hypothermic human.

Gantt chart for body warmer design

Figure 3: Gantt chart for design of body-warmer device

References

  1. Joseph Heagney, Fundamentals of Project Management, 5th ed., 2016, American Management Association.

Document updated 2018-01-22.

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