So the French railway industry has recently discovered their new trains are too wide for their older stations. An embarrassing and very expensive mistake, but sadly not the first or the last time such errors have occurred. But how do these mistakes occur in a modern world?!
Sadly the answer is the same in almost all cases : poorly planned, defined and controlled interfaces and specifications.
How frustrating would it be to get your new iPad, only to find the USB cable doesn’t quite fit into your computer, so doesn’t work! Or in a new industrial development to get the different parts of the system together for the first time only to discover they don’t fit together! It is too easy in the early stages of a project when the team wants to get cracking on the design tasks, to assume that everyone understands the end goal, understands who is responsible for which part, who needs to talk to whom and where the lines lie. Often in the interest of speeding up the project and save budget, well thought out and detailed specifications and interfaces are skipped…..
For some small product developments, if you have a small team working closely together with good team communication it can be possible to get away with thin specifications, but not advisable. Problems you come across could be quickly spotted and “made good”, but it is still easy to over spend and get delayed. In larger and more complex projects skipping the specification step can be fatal.
As much as it is hard to stomach, spending more time setting out the interfaces and specifications pays dividends later on! If done correctly, the majority of the hard work is done; the remaining work is detailed design around very well defined interfaces and requirements to get a final product. At this stage, it is possible to distribute the system as isolated segments to individuals or groups for design; as long as they follow the interfaces you can progress rapidly and be happy the design will come together with minimal problems.
So if done correctly, you can sleep happy at night knowing that when it comes together, you won’t have a drive shaft going through the centre of a motor, a fire escape going through a wall, or high power electronics going through a fuel tank!
Read more about our experience in product development here