The Dark Side of Concurrent Design: A Story of Improvisations, Workarounds, Nonsense and Success

Kurzfassung

The Concurrent Design is a powerful way to harmonize the work of many specialists in an iterative manner, especially in the early phases of a development project. Several agencies and industry in the space sector as well as related academic institutions are applying this Systems Engineering methodology increasingly for the last two decades. Concurrent Design is a customer-oriented, result-driven approach which facilitates both creativity and structured processes by continuously guided and highly-interactive working sessions. It is a serious business in which efficiency and effectiveness are given high priority in order to reduce time and cost of the design activity. All of this is true. However, what happens when you put between 15 and 30 very well educated people in one room? What happens when mechanical engineers instantly have to use a model-based systems engineering tool although their last software course was Fortran and took place about 20 years ago? How does it end if four different nationalities discuss in a fifth language (i.e. English) the various applicable methods for option selection- and decision making processes in a study. And can you imagine what happens if scientists talk to engineers (and vice versa) about the minimum required and maximum desired scientific output of an exploration mission? It could go into chaos. But it does not need to. The present paper describes a set of e.g. technical, infrastructural, social and cultural issues, which may rise and rose already in Concurrent Design studies. It points out the major important steps of how to handle them in general, based on experiences. Special attention is given to the fact, that with such a diverse set-up of experts, using various (new) tools within a complex multi-media environment, the key is a good atmosphere amongst the people and the awareness that the dark side of concurrent engineering could appear everywhere and should be turned into: fun.