Visible Knowledge
The ability for a development system to reliably deliver projects on time and to budget effectively and efficiently requires a means for building and capturing reusable knowledge. Visible knowledge is the fundamental backbone of knowledge based development systems.
Causal Diagrams and Limit & Trade-off curves
What makes visible knowledge so transformative is that it changes the design process from “try something” and see how it works to understanding the physics and economics of a design concept as it relates to your customer needs first, before committing to a particular design. In other words, the process becomes knowledge-based or knowledge-driven versus iterative. By using techniques to make knowledge visible, many benefits result, such as: deeper technical expertise acquired more quickly and shared across projects, efficiently identifying feasible regions of the design space, effective communication of technical information to non-experts, and improved cross-functional collaboration. Together, these result in quicker, more reliable decision-making which, in turn, results in better designs delivered faster, more economically and with greater predictability – in short, more effective and more reliable product development.
The basic concept can be summarized in four steps:
Assemble data about a set or family of products (or manufacturing processes or suppliers or…) This is often initiated through the means of a causal diagram to establish interdependencies and focus the efforts.
Find a combination of variables that makes sense out of the data. The combination of factors may not be a standard equation, but together represent a logical representation of the variables involved and identify a correlation between input (independent) variables and output factors (resultant variables).
Show the data visually, so that we can see the limit between the safe and infeasible regions, or the trade-off of the output change as a function of input variables.
Pick a design solution in the safe region that optimizes the trade-off variables.
Questions to Consider:
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How is knowledge created and captured?
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How much knowledge is reused on a project?
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How often are development teams surprised by last minute issues, problems and rework?
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Is it clear how close designs are to the infeasible region?
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Do design efforts move along curves and does research work to shift curves?
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Do all design efforts draw from existing knowledge and contribute to new knowledge?
Would you like to learn more about Visible Knowledge?
Click on the book cover to the right to learn about the book, "Visible Knowledge for Flawless Design" which describes the basics of Visible Knowledge and provides an example to work through to learn how Visible Knowledge benefits the product development process.
