Today, we had Professor Olivier de Weck as guest lecturer speaking our System Engineering class. He is engaging and his lecture on Isoperformance was
interesting. In short,
Isoperformance is a concept conceived by Prof. de Weck, in which he
argues that the goal of any system (or product) development project is
not seek for a solution that produces the optimal performance. Because
of resource constraints, solution leading to optimal performance will usually end up being
over-designed and often costing too much and being too narrowly focused.
A better approach is to define a set of desired performance targets and
work backwards to discover a set of acceptable solutions.
Two interesting questions were raised in the lecture. First, Uday asked
the question: "If safety is a critical requirement of a product,
shouldn't engineers strive to optimize safety in their design." This
question wasn't adequately answered in today's session but it was
argued that Isoperformance still has its place in the design process as
long as we
can define the desired level of safety performance. I am not too sure
if this is true, after all this argument works only if we assume that
such desired level is known at design time. So here's my question, how
safe is safe? Can
there be too much safety available in a product?
In the next question, Joe asked the question
that alluded to how Isoperformance may stifle innovation in the design
and development process. I respectfully disagree with Joe on this one.
I believe that innovation and Isoperformance can co-exist harmoniously
in engineering environments. Drawing, once again, from my professional
experience, I remember that the lofty goals of a particular project at
my company have undermined the company's ability to release the product
on time to the market. The designers were simply fixated in delivering
the highest performing
products and neglected other aspects of the process, such as lead time,
manufacturing cost, etc. Innovation isn't about optimal design but
rather the introduction of new concepts that have positive impact
on the product, and its users and producers. I believe that
Isoperformance can help to
achieve a balanced system by using a set of pre-defined expected
performance while still allowing innovations to flourish under these
conditions.
| 7/19/2005 11:35:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) |
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