Metrics and Case Studies for
Evaluating System Designs

Terry Bahill
Systems and Industrial Engineering
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0020, USA
terry@sie.arizona.edu
http://www.sie.arizona.edu/eysengr/slides/cases.ppt.
© 1998-2004 Bahill

There are many books, short courses, standards, handbook and manuals that explain various facets of the system design process. In addition, we think that studying examples of successful and unsuccessful designs will help people assess the risk of proposed projects. In this talk we present 27 case studies and eight metrics that can be used to assess risks of project failure. We propose that such case studies and metrics can be developed by other companies as is appropriate for their products. Thus we hypothesize that engineers can develop company-specific metrics for the quantitative assessment of design feasibility. For example our 27 case studies spanned four regions on our chart of design difficulty and resources. If a small consumer products company were asked to design and build a system that fell into the Star Wars region, the systems engineers should suggest that the project is infeasible and decline the money. Two regions in our metrics space suggested high project risk: the region of high technological risk and the region of high political risk.

References [63 and 68]. This lecture is designed for engineers. It could be adapted for the general public. This talk requires an overhead projector (or PowerPoint and a computer projection system). This talk takes one hour.