7.4.1 Towards a Value‐Driven Design Methodology – Enhancing Traditional Requirements Management Within the Extended Enterprise

During the initial phases of a new aircraft program, many conceptual decisions are made, concerning primarily the early product positioning with regard to competitors, the definition of the program's high level objectives, the architectural design choices and the selection of the preliminary design solutions. All these decisions are made on the basis of their assumed “Value”, i.e. each choice is expected to generate value for the customer and/or other stakeholders. Although many methods and tools are used to support the necessary analyses and trade-off activities, plus the subsequent decision-making; value related information such as concrete value drivers that allow for early conceptual orientation at different development levels are not usually shared explicitly within the extended enterprise between the concerned organisations. Current Systems Engineering (SE) standards do not address ‘Value’ in much detail. Yet, understanding what drives the generation of stakeholder value in a given business context, is fundamental to promoting a common and clear vision throughout the extended enterprise, of what should be the focus of their early, conceptual work at all levels of development. In light of increasing pressures to reduce development cycles and times-to-market, companies at several levels within the extended enterprise have to start working ever earlier in a programme context, long before their input requirements will have been cascaded down to them. This paper introduces a novel and iterative approach to address this problem – by making available business context related ‘Value Creation Strategies' including ‘Value Drivers' that can be cascaded down within the extended enterprise very early in a new aircraft development program. This will allow companies at any level to start their early, conceptual work on a much more relevant basis than would otherwise be the case. This Value-Driven Design (VDD) methodology has been developed, and will be validated in the context of the CRESCENDO (Collaborative and Robust Engineering using Simulation Capability Enabling Next Design Optimisation) research project1. It does not introduce new value measurement methods, but rather aims at articulating a generic process, making use of Value representation and Value cascading as a complement to “traditional” requirements cascading.