Designing by standard: Interview with Mike Ayre

Mike Ayre, the managing director of Crucible Industrial Design is an enthusiast for collaborative working as set out in BS 7000 part 2. He explains: "We are a first and foremost a product design consultancy and became very interested in the standard because it has a lot of common sense guidance, especially about the importance of teamwork. A lot of the companies could do this better." "Developing new products has never been the most reliable route to guaranteed riches," he says. " Many ideas never see the light of day and of those that do, a significant proportion fail. The reasons for these failures are extremely varied, but often come down to poor understanding of the market and lack of organisation." In order to remedy this, he believes that "Everybody needs to be involved right from the beginning. Projects tend to be driven either by marketing or technical, but both need to work together. Often we are initially contacted by one or the other, and told the other side will be brought in later. However, if all issues can be hammered out and managed early in the development process, things will go better." On the question of how much better, he did not specify numbers, but instead cited the example of a recent product development his firm had been involved in where the whole thing had been managed very efficiently", with the result that the product took only eight weeks to progress from idea to be being put on the market. On the other hand, if information had been, "Going back and forth between departments, the same process would probably have taken three or four months". Ayres is convinced that BS 7000 Part 2, 1997, 'Design management systems. Guide to managing the design of manufactured products' sets this out clearly." As the preamble says, "The emphasis of the process is the early, low cost stages where most management decisions are taken and most finance committed." As part of the process, he is convinced that "The same people should come to every meeting, and that these team meetings should be held, typically, about once a fortnight." He believes that particular problems result if management decides to send different people to each meeting, so that everyone has a turn and a chance to find from the 'horse's mouth', what is going on. He says: "[such a policy] is always a mistake, since it means that every meeting has to go over old ground to bring the newcomers up to speed." "The importance of holding regular design reviews cannot be overstated," he says, "Which is somewhat ironic, as they are often forgotten. We all know the situation – deadlines to meet, finding a time when everyone is available, and the concern that Keith from production is going to raise a problem that you'd rather not confront. "So the reviews don't happen. The problem with this is not that the project will fail – it probably won't – but it will be less successful than it would have been if the regular reviews had taken place, as you will have missed all the opportunities that they would have identified. (Keith actually had a great idea that would have taken half an hour off the assembly time…)." Given increasing globalisation in design and manufacture, might this process be undertaken online? While Ayres says that online collaboration is, "Extremely useful", he points out that video conferencing has never really caught on despite some companies spending large sums on video conferencing suites. However, he does believe that, with improvement in the relevant technologies, online collaboration is going to be increasingly important. He believes, however, that "Face-to-face contact is still way preferable, because people can check out the body language of those they are meeting with." The other aspect of BS7000-2 that Mike is keen on is prototyping. CAD companies often tell us that there is no need to prototype, except to verify the CAD model. This may work well enough when the new product is not radically different from its predecessor. James Dyson, Ayre observes, believes in lots of prototypes as part of the development process and the standard defines different types of prototype from 'experimental' through 'test' to 'development' and 'pre-production'. The standard also stresses the importance of 'Verification and validation'. Ayre says that 'Verification' is the process of checking that the design conforms to the specified requirements, while 'Validation', is about whether the design conforms to customer needs and requirements, or in other words, verification depends on whether or not the product works, while validation is about its suitability to be sold. To assist in the promotion of these views and to assist others, Mike has written a 1485 word paper, "Tipping the odds in your favour: minimising risk in product development", about making use of the ideas in BS 7000 part 2, available from Crucible Design, free of charge.