Master's Thesis
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MASTER'S THESIS A Lightweight Approach for Sharing Lessons Learned Development of a supporting tool for sharing Lesson Learned in early stages of product development Jens Jönsson Master of Science Mechanical Engineering Luleå University of Technology Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences Acknowledgment First and foremost I owe my gratitude to the Lord for his presence and strength he has given me during this work. I would like to thank my family especially my father Dominique, and my mother Pauline, for their support throughout the years and to my fiancée Greta for her unbelievable patience and support throughout the thesis work. I give many thanks to my supervisors, Marco Bertoni and Christian Johansson, for all their friendly guidance and patience during this thesis. Also thanks to my examiner, Åsa Ericson, who has made this work possible. Additionally I want to thank my collaborative research colleague Koteshwar Chirumalla who has given valuable contribution to product development process/performance. Last but not least, I would like to thank my opponent Alexander Abgar Afram for his careful reading of this report and for giving me valuable comments and linguistic feedback. Finally, I owe a debt to test participants, friends and acquaintances who have supported me, and the work, either by contributing knowledge, or inspiration. Thanks. Jens Jönsson ,Luleå, 2011-10-09 ii Abstract This thesis reports on a development project of a Lessons Learned knowledge management system. lessons learned (LL) is a knowledge sharing method that takes advantage of useful knowledge from previous or on-going project events in order to be reused in on-going or following project activities. Product Development (PD) is an area particularly of particular interest when it comes to sharing lessons learned. In a early design phase, in fact, various experts have to share what they know about the hardware and its services to create a successful product concept. This knowledge takes often the form of lessons learned, that is the form of recommendations that are specific and measurable. These lessons, however, are very seldom formalized in a way that can be readily used across the organizational boundaries by the product development. Most of this knowledge is usually tacit and in general difficult to formalize and share. Accordingly, there is a need to establish a structured Lesson Learned System (LLS) that takes into consideration all obstacles in conveying knowledge amongst different people. This involves giving guidelines on how to structure the LL in different cross-functional development activities. The development of the LLS kicked off with the analysis of the user needs and the identification of relevant requirements. The definition of the requirements list was aided by a generic knowledge lifecycle derived from the literature and composed by five different steps: collecting, verifying, storing, disseminating and reusing LL. In the concept development phase a strong emphasis has been given to the concept of “lightweight” knowledge sharing technologies. The guiding principles and mechanism of Web 2.0 have been considered particularly interesting to enhance the level of interaction between the system users and to leverage the way the system is populated, maintained, updated and validated across the company. Eventually, the thesis presents the results of the prototyping phase. A LLS mock-up has been developed and tested both with researchers and practitioners working in the laser welding domain, as well as with in design sessions with students. The lessons learned system detailed specifications as well as the feedback from the validation activities have to be considered the main results of this master work. iii Table of content Acknowledgment ............................................................................................................................................. ii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................. iii Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................................... vi 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Objective ................................................................................................................................................. 2 1.2 Delimitations ......................................................................................................................................... 2 2. Research approach ..................................................................................................................................... 3 3. Theoretical framework ............................................................................................................................. 6 3.1 Product development ........................................................................................................................ 6 3.1.1 Activities in early stages of product development ......................................................... 7 3.2 Knowledge Management ............................................................................................................... 11 3.3 Lessons Learned ............................................................................................................................... 12 3.3.1 Capturing and managing lessons ....................................................................................... 13 3.4 Lightweight Technology ................................................................................................................ 16 4. Towards a lightweight Lessons Learned capturing system .................................................... 19 4.1 Trends using Lessons Learned .................................................................................................... 19 4.2 Lessons Learned Systems – from customer expectations to benchmarking metrics ......................................................................................................................................................................... 20 4.2.1 Formulating features needed .............................................................................................. 21 4.3 Requirements definition for the LL system ............................................................................ 22 4.4 Defining a metrics for the LL system ........................................................................................ 24 5. Generating Lessons Learned System concepts ............................................................................ 27 5.1 Review of complete and potential Lessons Learned System ........................................... 27 5.2 Approach of Lessons Learned System ...................................................................................... 27 5.3 Advantages and disadvantages in studied Lessons Learned System ........................... 28 5.4 Choice of Lessons Learned System approach ........................................................................ 28 5.5 Decomposition of Lessons Learned System steps ............................................................... 29 5.6 Concept generation .......................................................................................................................... 32 6. LL system concept selection and detailed description.............................................................. 36 iv 6.1 Detailed design .................................................................................................................................. 37 7. LL system testing and validation ....................................................................................................... 40 8. Concluding remarks ................................................................................................................................ 48 References ....................................................................................................................................................... 50 v Abbreviations AAR After Action Review ALDS Active Lesson Delivery System DSS Decision Support System FFE Fuzzy Front End KM Knowledge Management LL Lessons Learned LLS Lessons Learned System MD Monitored Distribution MOKA Methodology and tools Oriented to Knowledge-Based Engineering Applications OMAS Open Multi Agency System PA Personal Assistant PD Product Development RCA Root Cause Analyses R&D Research and Development SA Service Agent SotA State Of the Art vi 1. Introduction The early stages of PD can be seen as a set of activities devoted to the gathering of knowledge with the goal to develop a product that fits the end users needs. Given the criticality of the task and the stringent deadlines that characterize the product development process, it is important to utilize the most effective tools and methods for collecting such information. In addition to saving time on selecting the right tools and methods, it is important to create a working environment that supports cross- functional teamwork, and supports knowledge sharing between them. This can be done by taking advantage of knowledge from the different people involved in the process through reusing Lessons Learned (LL)