Design

The Design state consists of refining and operationalizing the project's conception. The company has bought into the project and is devoting substantial resources. The project may be assigned to an existing design team, or an entirely new design organization may come into place. Concerns include:

• What will be the distinguishing factors in the marketplace?
• What product features do customers require?
• What product features will we be able to deliver?
• How do we minimize cost and maximize reliability?
• How will the design be handed off to other groups, such as Engineering?

In our model, there is a 0.6 probability each quarter that a project will move from the Design state to the Production state. There is a 0.1 probability that the project will move from the Design state back to the Vision state. There is a 0.3 probability that the project will remain in the Design state. This indicates a rather aggressive Design time scale. Our model does not reflect a possibility that a project may be permanently abandoned in the Design stage. Instead, the Design documents are retained in the corporate archives and may be revisited during future consideration of the same or similar projects.

If the Coupling From The Past algorithm results in the Design state, this means that the Design state always occurred at time t=0, regardless of what states occurred at any time in the past.