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23-Mechatronics-B8 Product Design and Development · December 2019

Question 3 of 7: Recognizing and Correcting a Design Process Going Off Track

Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)

Notes on this paper

National Exams, 16-Mex-B8, Product Design and Development — December 2019, 3 hours, open-book examination (Casio or Sharp approved calculator only). Question 1 (40 marks) is mandatory; candidates choose 4 of the remaining 6 questions (15 marks each, only the first five questions as they appear in the answer book are marked, for a total of 100%). This is an essay/design-methodology paper with no numerical calculations. All seven questions are answered below for completeness.

Reference texts: Ulrich, Eppinger & Yang, Product Design and Development, 7th ed. (generic product-development process, concept generation and selection, Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, intellectual-property strategy); Government of Canada, Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), A Guide to Patents (Patent Act novelty/ utility/non-obviousness requirements, first-to-file rule, maintenance fees); Transport Canada, Motor Vehicle Safety Act and Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (CMVSS).

The wording of Question 1 parts A, D and E is assumed from the sub-part labels. Question 1 is an open-ended design-process question (the paper states that following a defined design process matters more than the actual design), so it is answered as: pick a team; state objectives; propose competing solutions; select the best; write specifications. Question 5 parts B and C are answered from their stems, which are clear. Question 7's sub-parts are taken to be the text printed under Question 6 part C; see the check note on Question 7 for the reasoning.

Question 3: Recognizing and Correcting a Design Process Going Off Track (15 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

A. Three early warning signs

(1) Requirements churn. Requirements that keep changing after the concept phase has closed — repeated late "just one more feature" requests — are usually the first visible sign that the team never actually agreed what it was building, and every change forces rework in whatever downstream work has already started against the old baseline. (2) Schedule slip concentrated at the earliest milestones. If the very first design reviews are already late, the project is not merely behind, it has an unresolved technical or organizational problem that will compound at every later, more expensive stage. (3) Design reviews that keep surfacing the same unresolved issues. When successive design reviews raise the same open questions without converging on a decision, it signals either an unclear decision-making process or a team that lacks the authority/data to close issues — a structural problem, not a one-off delay.

B. Rectifying each problem

Requirements churn is fixed by freezing a requirements baseline under a formal change-control board: any new requirement after the freeze must be justified, costed and traded against the schedule/budget impact before acceptance, which converts an open-ended stream of requests into a disciplined, visible decision. Early schedule slip is addressed by re-baselining the critical path with the team (rather than quietly hoping to make up time later), adding resources or running tasks in parallel where the technical risk allows it, and trimming non-critical scope so the program's core deliverables stay on track. Recurring unresolved design-review issues are fixed by bringing in an independent design review board with the authority to force a decision, using a structured decision tool (e.g. the weighted concept-selection matrix of Question 1D) so the choice is data-driven rather than deferred again, and assigning each open issue a single named owner and hard deadline so "still under discussion" is no longer an acceptable status at the next review.