Adaptive Engineering
by Darren Ashby

Have you ever finished a product design after which some change was required that you desperately wished you had been told about at the beginning? Have you ever said, "If you had just told me sooner, this feature would have cost half as much to add on now"? You may even have had your boss say why didn't you do what I told you to do (when you did exactly what he/she wanted). I'll let you in on a secret. Most of your pointy haired bosses don't want you to fail. They just want to ship a killer product so their bonus will be bigger.

They don't tell you sooner because they don't know sooner. They try to guess what the customers want and give it to them. In his mind he didn't say do such and such a product. He said make this product successful. As companies chase the market around, new products are developed, changed, and changed again. I call this Management "Always chasing the Market Around" or MAMA for short. (I figure if you give it an acronym, it will be remembered.) Now because of MAMA, many engineers experience consternation when their product definition changes.

In the world of consumer products, this is bound to happen often. When I first took over the engineering group where I work, this particular frustration was often felt. As I worked with the various designers in the company, I found that it was possible to anticipate these changes and prepare for them. When you get good at this, you can respond to changes easily and quickly, and you can also develop a number of derivative products quickly and inexpensively.

Modular Design
One of the most important things that you need to do to anticipate change is to get your designs modularized. Here, hardware designers can take note from their counter parts in software design. Good software engineers build blocks of code that can be used and re-used again. However, I often see hardware designers start with a clean sheet for every new design.

To make your modular design work for you, you must evaluate the products you are designing. Are there any components that are commonly removed and installed on various designs? What parts are common to all or most of your products? Sit down and draw lots of block diagrams and ask yourself, "Is this a part that needs to be easy to take on and off?" If it is, it may be a candidate for a separate PCB or a section of the PCB all to itself. In a line of stereo products for example, you keep the tuner section separate from the pre-amp and so on. (On a side note, this often improves the robustness of a design as well.)

A great advantage of this modular approach is the way it can accelerate the development process, by using separate engineers on the various modules. It also allows you to upgrade or improve parts of the design without redoing the whole thing. But in my mind, best of all, it makes it easy to change a feature when your boss decides he really didn't want that there on this particular model.

One word of warning however; you need to be careful what parts you choose to modularize. Too many modules can add up to extra cost in every product you ship. Make sure it makes sense.

Anticipate Changes
Try to get involved in the creation process so that you can see various phases of evolution the product design has gone through. Often times, changes that are made will be back or forth on this evolutionary path. Keep asking yourself, where else could this be used? How would I change it to work there?

Look for places where a part seems to be missing. Let me show you an example. You are asked to make a PCB with a row of LEDs that look like this:

Say great, no problem, then create a PCB with this row of LEDs and simply do not stuff the missing one for now.

Do not hesitate to tell your co-workers or boss what you are doing. They can be a great asset in anticipating changes they might come up with later. The bottom line is that it takes a tremendous amount of work to re-design every product every time, but if you can develop effective modules and anticipate changes when you are engineering the product, you can bring things to market faster and cheaper than anyone else. A nice benefit of this type of anticipative design is that when you are asked to develop a similar product, you have all the pieces in place. You simply add or subtract the required feature and are done with it. And best of all, MAMA will not drive you berserk!

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