Don't wish for cross-functional buy-in on product designs - plan to get it!

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

We take these wishes...
"I wish I had the cross functional input that I need for design inputs."
"I wish I could work with my cross functional team."
"I wish my team would accept my design idea."

...and we add a plan to make them a GOAL.

We plan for what it is we want and how we're going to get there using Quality during Design.

Join the waitlist for the Quality during Design Journey for a special offer.

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About me
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations optimize their engineering processes and team performance by promoting the use of reliability and quality methods during design. She offers consulting services for managers and directors, training for engineers through the Quality During Design program, and other practical resources.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi, it's Dianna Deeney. Last week we talked about the importance of shifting from problem solving to problem finding when we're in the concept phases of product development with a new product design, and especially being able to do this with our cross-functional team. This week, let's take it a step further and talk about how we do that, how we talk with our team and have working cross-functional meetings that are meaningful and get us to understand more about this new product that we're developing, even without having prototypes yet more to come After this brief introduction.

: 0:41

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products, others love for less. Each week we talk about ways to use quality during design, engineering, and product development. I'm Dianna Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in and then join us. Visit quality during design.com.

Speaker 1: 1:09

Because you're a listener of the Quality During Design podcast, I wanna give you a special offer at the top of this episode. Sign up on the wait list for the Quality during Design Journey and get a special offer from me. The quality during Design Journey is an online training course. It's actually three different courses in one, and we're touching on some of the concepts of it today. At a high level, the quality during design journey will be getting you into how to do it with your team step by step . Then what you can do with it. Next, choose sign up for the wait list anywhere on the quality during design website, click the courses link in the top menu header, find any of the yellow buttons that say, join the wait list . Go ahead and click that and sign up. When you join the wait list , you're not committing to anything but learning more about the special offer when the journey becomes available. We are in the final stages of wrapping up these courses to release to you the final quality checks, if you will, so this button and this offer is not going to be around for mom . This opportunity is going to be going away, and the special offer is going to be going away too , so go ahead and go to the website, click on courses and join the wait list. You won't be disappointed. We've been talking about shifting from problem solving to problem finding in early concept development and doing it with our cross-functional teams, getting them involved in some of the problem finding and gathering information. How do we do that when we don't even know what to ask them and they don't know what to tell us? There's a famous saying, and I couldn't find out exactly who it was attributed to, but the saying is, A goal without a plan is just a wish. We're going to change this wish from, I wish I had the cross-functional input that I need for design inputs. I wish I could work with my cross-functional team, and we're going to add a plan to that to make it a goal. We're going to plan for what it is that we want and how it is we want to get there as far as what we want. We want to explore the use space, the concept space of this new product design. We want to explore the benefits that the users are going to be experiencing when things go right and we want to explore the potential symptoms when things might go wrong, and we wanna look at how this user is going to be using our product. We definitely want to check the assumptions of our use space heading into all of these things. Do we really have the right customers? Do we have all the customers? Where are they starting with our product? What type of environment are they working in? Those kind of things. Those assumptions about the use space is something that we just want to clear up and make sure we're on the same page with our cross-functional team. If that is the what to our goal, that's the type of information that we wanna be able to develop design inputs against for our new product. Then how are we going to get there? We're going to get there by using frameworks that are common quality and reliability tools for cross-functional team meetings. For each area of the concept space that we want to explore, we're going to choose a framework to work against. It's going to be broken out and easy for people to be able to communicate and talk about, and we're going to be able to get great design inputs from it. Here are just a few of the tools that we can use as frameworks to explore the use space with our cross-functional team. We can evaluate the use process that our customers are taking with our product to get from A to B start to finish. We can map it out with a process flow chart . This is going to give us alignment with our team that we're all on the same page and we're working toward the same goal as far as what the expectations of this product might be. This is going to give us alignment with our cross-functional team and our customers, and we can take it a step further with other analyses to highlight things that are critical or value added. Those are areas that are going to be important for our design to do well. Tree diagrams are really useful to build with a team to get to the root of an idea or to get to a requirement or problem. A econo model is a two-way matrix of how much to implement a feature for customer satisfaction and risk analyses are a way to analyze risk to do something about them, design in controls and design out risks. These are just a few of the quality and reliability frameworks we can use with our cross-functional team to develop design inputs at concept development. This next part I think that I like even more is that what is done at concept, what we've done with our team and what we've created, we can iterate it throughout product development to be able to answer more questions. As we're developing the product through development, the product is coming into a reality and we're learning more about its capabilities and limitations, and well just more about it as it becomes more real. We can take things like the process flow chart and put them into a task analysis so we can mistake proof the design. We can look at what we prioritize with the Conna model. Put that into a matrix diagram to compare features to technical design. Inputs and risk analyses can be fed into FMEAs failure mode and effects analysis, so it's not like whatever we did at concept design was that concept and now we never look at it ever again. We're actually starting the conversation at concept development, and then we continue to have a conversation with our cross-functional team through development. Whatever work that we did with our team at Concept isn't wasted and finished. We continue to use it to help us make decisions. Decisions about the functionality and performance of the product itself. What are the priorities of these different features and capabilities? How many samples do we need to test? Where do we need to work with our suppliers to better control these quality aspects? What customer service capabilities do we need to change in order to best support our customers with this new product overall? Today's insight is this. If we want these kind of design inputs with our cross-functional team early and we want them to drive decisions so we can design for excellence, then we need to have a plan for how we're going to get it. Quality and reliability tools are a great thing to plan around to be able to accomplish this. At the top of this episode, I talked about joining the wait list for the Quality during Design journey. I want to remind you about this. Again, we really are wrapping things up and making sure links work and downloads can be downloaded, and then this course is going to be going live. When you join the wait list , I'll give you a special offer that no one else is going to ever get Again , go to the website quality during design.com on the header, click courses , and then click one of the yellow buttons. It says, join the wait list . This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Until next time, thanks for listening.