When Are Specifications Established?
In an ideal world, the team would establish the product specifications once early in the development process and then proceed to design and engineer the product to exactly meet those specifications. For some products, such as soap or soup, this approach works quite well; the technologists on the team can reliably concoct a formulation that satisfies almost any reasonable specifications. However, for technology-intensive products this is rarely possible. For such products, specifications are established at least twice. Immediately after identifying the customer needs, the team sets target specifications. These specifications represent the hopes and aspirations of the team, but they are established before the team knows what constraints the product technology will place on what
can be achieved. The team 's efforts may fail to meet some of these specifications and may exceed others, depending on the product concept the team eventually selects. For this reason, the target specifications must be refined after a product concept has been selected. The team revisits the specifications while assessing the actual technological constraints and the expected production costs. To set the final specifications, the team must frequently make hard trade-offs among different desirable characteristics of the product. For simplicity, we present a two-stage process for establishing specifications, but we note that in some organizations specifications are revisited many times throughout the development process.
The two stages in which specifications are established are shown as part of the concept development process in Exhibit 6-3. Note that the final specifications are one of the key elements of the development plan , which is usually documented in the project 's contract book. The contract book (described in Chapter 18, Managing Projects) specifies what the team agrees to achieve, the project schedule, the required resources, and the economic implications for the business. The list of product specifications is also one of the key information systems used by the team throughout the development process.
This chapter presents two methods: the first is for establishing the target specifications and the second is for setting the final specifications after the product concept has been selected.