The Design Process 101

Are you Providing for your Design Teams Success?

Project Tip #5 - Planning, Planning and more Planning.

This month we will be discussing the role you play in ensuring your design teams success. It's about managing the team towards successful execution to meet the objectives of your organization. If you do not have design processes in place, managing the details of execution, the design is "just happening" and your schedule slips away from you because of a number of surprises and missed expectations.

You want your design team to be a creative, allowing innovative new products to fill your product portfolio. You also want them to execute the plan to bring these innovative products to market per the plan. The mix of a highly creative nature rolled in with skills to execute to plan does not come naturally to a team. What tends to happen is we assume that tools and program management cover the execution details while allowing the creative nature of the team to flow. This assumption is rarely valid. You must explicitly stimulate the team's execution skills.

Design tools will not manage all of design processes and program management does not offer the depth into the design details to be affective in the particulars. You must manage the design from within, concentrating on the details of interactions and deliverables between designers and the design team's external customers such as test, product and marketing functions. The processes to manage the design execution are your "tools" and they must be developed within the design team. Examples of these process tools would include travelers, checklists, engineering specification content, team meetings, specification change management, best practices, lessons learned, review procedures and specification closure procedures.

The key in development of these tools for managing your design process is that it is joint effort between the design team, test, product engineering and program management. Everyone on the product development team has needs and the entire team must reach consensus on who is doing what and the specific deliverables of each step. Consensus first followed up by the necessary documentation "tools" to confirm the plan. Ferret out any issues, get them on the table, address them and build up your tools to remove them as a continuing issue. Do not assume that the formal design tools are managing the details of your entire design process.

Do you have time to plan? Before you can answer this question you must define the milestone by which you measure your projects execution against. If you focus your project milestones on when the database is fractured, you will undoubtedly indicate you do not have time for much planning. It might be viewed as wasted time and since it is extra work, it will have a direct impact on the fracture date. The trouble with a focus on a fracture milestone to answer the "do you have time to plan?" question is you have nothing tangible to hand your customer at this point. You must assess the impact of planning against a real customer deliverable.

If you pose that same question with a focus on samples or production ramp you will likely have an entirely different response. How many times do you typically need to go back into design to make changes after first silicon? Was the design testable enough for planned test costs? Did it yield as planned? Did it meet the customer's application requirement? Did it require a pass to meet ESD & latchup requirements? The level of planning completed for the project determines how you would answer these questions.

If you are taking your first silicon into production while meeting the plan your level of planning is on target. If you are plagued by unexpected spins and/or surprises during execution, a look at your planning activities is certainly in order. In many cases planning comes down to making sure everyone knows their deliverables into the project. The who, what, when, where and how of their part in the project. The necessary planning activities are easily covered in the development of your design processes.