Hardware engineering change management : an enterprise analysis of factors contributing to technical change

Abstract

Engineering change management (ECM) is an essential but challenging cross-functional discipline within modern product development firms. ECM is best explained as a discipline because no single process can characterize the complex interactions between stakeholders, processes, information systems, knowledge management practices and cultural factors that enable the control of technical design change. One major challenge to product development projects is gaining actionable a priori insight into the risk of technical design change in order to allocate resources to mitigate specific risks. This thesis employs systems thinking skills to identify and analyze corresponding a priori factors within a product development firm that designs large complex systems. A case study framework provides qualitative ECM analysis from an enterprise perspective with supporting empirical stakeholder interview data. Furthermore, the research design employs more than 7,000 design defects from three large system development programs to experiment with data-mining models for classifying and predicting technical defects. This research reveals some ECM risk factors and corresponding enterprise policies in the context of process, information, and stakeholder interactions. This study also offers both executable and conceptual quantitative defect models that are appropriate for proactive risk mitigation within specific ECM processes. Ultimately, this holistic analysis provides policy recommendations for the selected enterprise, and identifies factors that have general implications for contemporary industry.