Design Management Tools and Techniques
The tools listed below are organised according to the Key Design Activities of the Design Maturity Model.
Some may be familiar under these or similar names. Others, such as 'Process on a page' have been developed during the GDP project in response to company needs. The key goals of many of these design tools are to:
- bring together opinions, experiences and perspectives from around the business and support teamwork
- encourage a customer focus and customer involvement
- promote creativity and divergence when developing alternatives
- encourage decision making based on information rather than prejudice or gut-feel
Market understanding
- Market segmentation
- Purchasing motivation matrix
- Market structure illustration
- The competitive file (database)
- Market size & share estimation (end-user demand)
- Market size & share estimation (manufacturers sales)
- Competitive analysis - comparative product scaling
User understanding & involvement
- User / customer interviews
- Focus groups
- Lead user analysis
- Stakeholder analysis - lifecycle approach
- User profiling - personas
- Direct observation - ethnography, shadowing
- Stakeholder selection & planning matrix
- Delphi technique
- Contextual inquiry
Product definition
- Conjoint analysis
- Kano model
- QFD
- Image boards
- Affinity diagrams
- Product on a page - mission
- Product on a page - advert
- The "elevator speech"
Concept design & Prototyping
- Concept selection: Controlled convergence
- Morphological charts
- Osborn's checklist
- Concept selection: Weighting & rating
- Concept selection: Dot sticking
- Four types of testing - exploratory, assessment, validation, comparison
Design for production
- Unit cost analysis
- Design efficiency calculation
- Design complexity scorecard
- Boothroyd & Dewhurst complexity factor
- Value engineering / value analysis
Project generation
Process & project management
- Process on a page
- Project on a page
- Process mapping (brown paper)
- Risk assessment
- FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis)
- Metrics
