Like most creative design processes, electronics design would be whole lot easier without the need to consider the practicalities of the real end result – in this case, a tangible product that someone will buy and use. Timelines, cost limitations, component restrictions, physical constraints, and manufacturability would fade to the background, leaving behind unrestrained design freedom without the disruptive influence of external considerations.

It is a nice thought, but the reality is that electronics design is just one part of the large, complex product design puzzle, and the puzzle pieces are no longer discrete entities that can be considered in isolation. The pieces unavoidably co-influence and interact, which makes the design development path to a final product a necessarily fluid and complex process. It is also one that involves managing and bringing together an increasing number of variable, co-dependent elements – the pieces of the puzzle – from different systems and locations. Pure electronics design is one thing, but successfully developing, producing, and keeping track of a complete electronic product is a much larger story.

From an electronics design perspective, those broader product development considerations are influencing and constraining the design process more than ever before. At the very least, the shift towards more complex and multi-domain electronic designs (typically involving hardware, software, programmable hardware and mechanical design) means a proportional increase in the risk of design-production errors. This has inevitably led to imposing tighter controls on the design process, as a risk management strategy.

From an organization’s point of view there seems little alternative to a risk-minimization approach that is based on tying down the electronics design process to control change. Leave the management of design open and design anarchy, or expensive errors, are likely outcomes. From an overall product development perspective, the peak in the risk-timeline curve (if there is such a thing) tends to be the transition from design to the production stage. This is a one-way step where an error, and there’s plenty to choose from, will delay and add cost to the final product – not to mention missed market opportunities, painful design re-spins and damaged customer relationships.

To increase the integrity of the design data that is released to production, most organizations are managing the electronic product development process by imposing a layer of control over the design process. This aims to control change and can take on a variety of forms, including manual paper-based sign-off procedures as well as external audit and approval systems. The common thread is that these approaches are an inevitable restriction in design freedom – in other words, they impose limits on how and when design changes can be made.

By restricting design experimentation and exploratory change, this ‘locked down’ product development environment does not encourage the design innovation that is crucial to creating competitive products. The upshot is that organizations must now balance two opposing forces when managing the product development process – the need to foster innovation versus the need to manage risk by maintaining design data integrity.

The second part in this three part series explores controlling risk.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2010 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Software Techniques, Voices of Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.