Validation of Distributed Risk Framework

Global companies realize the importance of collaborative design, or workshare, to develop products not only to target to a single market, but to sell them to the entire world. Workshare not only incorporates diverse customer values into the product development, but also introduces challenges in managing work distributions among global teams. As a result, the authors have developed a Distributed Risk Framework to quantify risk based on rework to facilitate workshare planning [5] [6]. The risk framework has been applied to several industry projects and it received positive feedback from the potential users of these pilot applications. To verify the risk results analytically, this paper seeks for statistical evidence to confirm the key assumption that motivates the development and the usage of the framework, with the assumption being that more distributed work results in a greater risk of rework. This paper begins with an overview of the risk framework followed by the steps of using actual rework data from the International Vehicle Company (IVC) to confirm the framework assumption. As a summary, this paper presents the contributions of the risk framework and the barriers to extend it to other distributed product development projects.