A measure of technical performance can be used to see how efficiently a design process is being implemented.
A technical performance measure is a formal mathematical approach to forecasting and managing production. Managers use a technical performance measure to measure productivity, risks, constraints, accuracy, and technical benchmarks. It can be applied to an individual project or used to measure an ongoing production system. A measure of technical performance may also be called a measure of business performance.
Anything that contributes to productive work, such as a person, a skill, or a piece of equipment, is considered a resource. These items are assigned and scheduled to achieve resource synchronization on a product development or production schedule. This is called leveling, because in the optimal efficiency arrangement, each resource is leveled along with the other resources according to start and end dates on a bar chart.
Resource load charts visually illustrate a measure of technical performance over a timeline, illustrating which tasks depend on others to get the job done right. Tasks that depend on other tasks are often listed on a Gantt chart, which uses horizontal lines to illustrate these dependencies. Identifying variables and adjusting production to constraints is part of an evaluation of technical performance.
A measure of technical performance may involve multivariate or combinatorial analysis. Both measures assess the impact of multiple variables on a production schedule. Combinatorial considers the dynamics of groups of people and processes that interact in a company. A multivariate analysis looks at each variable individually.
A company plans to design a prototype and then bring it into mass production. A design engineer might work as part of a team that would include a product designer, a researcher, and a quality control manager. This is an illustration of how technical performance measures can operate in a work environment.
At various stages of the process, one aspect of the designer’s job would report to the researcher, and the quality control manager’s job would report to the designer. A Gantt chart can show that one member of the dependent trio, on average, is idle 20% of the time while waiting for another team member to complete a task. By applying statistical analysis to dependencies, a manager can make adjustments and level the workload or schedule to eliminate downtime.
When changes occur to product design, personnel, or equipment due to constraints, a measure of technical performance would examine the risk that the change creates. In a technical performance measurement system, costs, productivity, and schedule are assigned a weight measure that corresponds to how many resources these factors consume, respectively. To optimize technical performance, a manager would assign weight to each factor. Combinatorial or multivariate measures can be used to reassign more or less weight to each factor in the process.