published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

Thesis (M. S.)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Prof. Dimitri Mavris; Committee Member: Dr. Elena Garcia; Committee Member: Dr. Neil Weston; Committee Member: Mathias Emeneth; Committee Member: Prof. Daniel P. Schrage.

The focus of this study is the effective prioritization of customer requirements in collaborative product development. The CR priorities are often retrieved by questioning and interviewing targeted customers. But the targeted customer might not always be easily questioned, because they might not always be obvious or clearly known. If customers might be known, they might not be able to distinct the priorities for CR's, because everything is important to them. Moreover concerns of the developer's organization and the society might not get the necessary attention and it might be asked too much from the customer to trade off all customer requirements (CR's) by their own. Because the resources for an extensive customer interviewing might lack anyway the stakeholders might prioritize the CR's on their own. Efforts have already been undertaken to support cross-functional stakeholder groups in finding priorities of CR's. Most of the investigated methods lacked the ability to distinct the importance of CR's by a relative amount or were not able to integrate the interdependency of stakeholders in other ways than a tiresome negotiation processes. With the proposed Urn-Scheme approach the stakeholders register their own individual priorities based on their perceptions of what the relative priorities of the CR's might be. Furthermore the method supports the stakeholders in considering the opinions of all other stakeholders. The extent of taking others and own opinion into account is based on quantified social interdependencies, i.e. in this study measured trust and trustworthiness into the capability of every voter to understand costumers' perceived desired product quality. The summed up trustworthiness in prioritizing CR's of every stakeholder is used in a further step to finally transform the individual priorities to relative priorities of CR's from the whole group. With the amplification of votes from the stakeholders, who are trusted to prioritize better than others, an improvement of the decision making process will be achieved. A careful developed, easily to understand mathematical framework builds the fundament for manifold analysis of the obtained voting results, e.g. consensus analysis, priority significance check. Moreover the framework makes the proposed method transparent and the obtained results well documented for later reference. / Graduation date: 2005

In the early stages of new product development, project selection is dominantly based on managerial intuition, rather than on analytic approaches. As much as 90% of all product ideas are rejected before they are formally assessed. However, to date, little is known about the product screening heuristics and screening criteria managers use: it has been suggested that their decision process resembles the "fast and frugal" heuristics identified in recent psychological research, but no empirical research exists. A major part of the product innovation pipeline is thus poorly understood. This research contributes to closing this gap. It uses cognitive task analysis for an in-depth analysis of the new product screening heuristics of twelve experienced decision makers in 66 decision cases. Based on the emerging data, an integrated model of their project screening heuristics is created. Results show that experts adapt their heuristics to the decision at hand. In doing so, they use a much smaller set of decision criteria than discussed in the product development literature. They also combine heuristics into decision approaches that are simple, but more complex than "fast and frugal" strategies. By opening the black box of project screening this research enables improved project selection practices.