The study presented in this paper compares requirement and manufacturing change management processes to determine if similar processes can be used for both types of changes. A literature review is used to identify prescribed process stages. Ten stages are identified for both requirements and manufacturing change management. A series of interviews are then conducted with three different population groups to determine the process stages actually used in the field. The resulting process models are compared with the process models from the literature. Further, a thematic analysis is performed on the interview findings. Ultimately, differences are found between the prescribed and practiced change management models for both types of changes. Formal documentation stages are more prevalent for the manufacturing domain, though documentation in practice is less than what is prescribed. This includes the issuance of change requests and change orders in manufacturing change management that are not present in requirement change management processes. Significant differences were also found between the two change types; namely, requirement changes deal with more abstract concepts and as such can afford more informal documentation, whereas manufacturing changes deal with existing artifacts and require solid documentation. Additional research thrusts are identified to help reconcile change management processes across the life cycle.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Tradespace exploration (TSE) is an important aspect of the early stages of the design process, in which stakeholders search for the most optimal solutions within a design variable-bounded solution space. This decision-making process requires stakeholders to understand the trade-offs and compromises that may be required to choose a solution. In order for stakeholders to make these decisions appropriately, information must be presented in an efficient manner and should ensure that the trade-offs between solutions are clearly visible. Existing visualizations often struggle to elucidate these trade-offs, and can rapidly become difficult to understand as the dimensionality of the tradespace increases. In this paper, the benefits and drawbacks to these existing methods will be discussed. In addition, this paper will explore potential methods to improve information presentation for TSE, including framing, visual steering, and visualization options. A three-phase study plan is then proposed to determine the effects of implementing these suggested improvements. The three phases of this study include various degrees of technological intervention with regard to how the tradespace is represented, including morphological charts, radar plots, and virtual reality-supported hyper-dimensional plots.</div></div>

Due to interest in aspects such as process, strategies, and tools of engineering changes expressed in a literature review, a case study was done on a major automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to assess the perceived quality of its part engineering change management process and supporting system through its employees’ eyes. A combination of 12 interviews lasting 12 h and 46 written surveys was used to capture the views of participants from all major functions found at the research and development (R&D) headquarters of the OEM: Purchasing, Production, Development, and one group consisting of all other functions (“Other”). Statistical analysis was performed to identify statistically significant differences between employee perceptions of an engineering change management system among different departments, amount of use, and years of use. It was found that statistically significant differences exist in terms of understanding the usability of the system between different departments and also between different years of experience.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Strategies for evaluating the impact of mission requirements on the design of mission-specific vehicles are needed to enable project managers to assess potential benefits and associated costs of changes in requirements. Top-level requirements that cause significant cascaded difficulties on lower-level requirements should be identified and presented to decision-makers. This paper aims to introduce formal methods and computational tools to enable the analysis and allocation of mission requirements. Initial results for three interrelated research problems are discussed: (1) understanding the current practices of interrelationships between requirements. the requirements elicitation and change management processes using a case study approach; (2) requirement elicitation using gamification strategies; and (3) computational representation of the technical requirements and identification The case study approach involves interviewing the stakeholders that participate in the requirements generation process to collect data on the current practices of requirements elicitation. Systematic requirements generation strategies, change management processes, limitations, and areas for improvement are the outcomes of this study. A gamification strategy is also deployed to study requirements elicitation and change management processes by incentivizing the users based on their performance on a set of metrics. Two surveys, one with and the other without gamification, are designed to study the impact of gamification methods on requirements elicitation. Lastly, text analytics tools are developed to extract requirements from textual descriptions and identify their inter-relationships to be stored in the requirement graph representation.</div></div>