what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
8.3.4.2.1 Step 4—Propose an
Objective Hierarchy
for
Identified Conflicting Design Task
Negotiating conflicting implementation proposals of a design task in the baseline
process indicates some differences in the stakeholders' objectives and perspectives
(i.e., preferences for arguments against the objectives achievement). hese objectives
includes the fundamental objectives for which the task is undertaken, the interme-
diate objectives that help achieve the fundamental objectives, and the objectives'
attributes for measuring the proposal degree to which the objectives are achieved.
hese attributes should be understandable to every stakeholder. If an objective does
not have any attributes that are used to interpret the objective (e.g., “network band-
width of engineering system” is a attribute of the objective “increase the throughput
of the system”), the attribute “support versus opposition” will be added. he stake-
holders in later steps can declare their perspective as either support or opposition. In
line with the goals defined at the beginning of the design process, the team should
be able to identify objectives and attributes in this step.
As discussed earlier, our approach uses an objective hierarchy to organize the
objectives and capture their diferences. his hierarchy is jointly built by the stake-
holders based on their understanding and expectations (“values”) of the design
tasks. And the objectives in this hierarchy will be dynamically changed by the
social interactions among the stakeholders. In reference to the information in an
objective hierarchy, the stakeholders can declare their preferences regarding how
important the objectives (i.e., the weights of the objectives) are, and how much
each proposal is supported or opposed. he latter will be obtained in the next
step, based on the values assigned by the stakeholders for the objectives' attributes.
he objective weights are collected in this step after these concepts are declared in
the structure. In details, the relative importance of each objective is defined on a
1-to-10 scale as follows:
10 = Very important
8 = Somewhat more important
6 = Important
4 = Somewhat less important
2 = Very less important
1 = Lowest importance
To get more accurate results, the objective weights were collected for each funda-
mental and means objective. After the perspectives were collected, the weight of
each means objective was adjusted as the average value of its weight and the weight
of its corresponding fundamental objective. he importance of an attribute was the
same as that of its objective.
To explain the concept structure further, we continue to use the task “estimate
quality attributes” as an example. Table 8.1 below describes this example objective
hierarchy, including information about stakeholders, objectives, and criteria. here
