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A Matter of Factor: A Proposed Method for Identifying Factors that Influence Design Effort Levels in Product Design

Part of: Design Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Alexander Holliman 'Freddie' ,
Avril Thomson ,
Abigail Hird  and
Nicky Wilson

Abstract

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Design effort, the amount of time required to complete a project or task (Salam et al., 2009; Salam and Bhuiyan, 2016), is a required resource for any design project which can be influenced by a number of factors. Estimating design effort is a significant challenge that can be mitigated through an understanding of these influential factors. This understanding is held as tacit knowledge by experts, earned through experience; yet, although these factors vary in type and impact, understanding their details can provide insight and improve future estimations. Some previous methods to estimate design effort identify these factors, either from: expert opinion, or historical data analysis with each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

This paper is comprised of three parts:

A review of published methods and tools for estimating product design effort and whether they consider and identify influential factors; an analysis of possible trends in the identification of factors influencing product design project length; and a new method for identifying the influential factors of product design project length.

Keywords

Design managementKnowledge managementProject managementDesign Effort Estimation
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 1025 - 1034
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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