TGFR Consulting LLC An initial round of concept confirmation with customers follows identification of the final concept. Concept confirmation involves realizing the concept as drawings, models or other tangible artifacts. Feedback gathered from users and customers confirms that the concept developed truly meets the user and customer needs. The process of concept development transforms user and customer needs, and this step validates that these transformations resulted in a final concept that meets the original user and customer needs
The confirmation process requires that the fidelity of the concept model presented to the users and customers be good enough to allow the users and customers to users to properly evaluate how the concept meets the VOC. Customers must be able to evaluate and score the final concept against the user needs statements and VOC, and this requires a good model. If the concept presented to the user is not of sufficient fidelity, good feedback will be difficult to obtain.
Models representing the final concept can be drawings, actual models or presentations depending upon the nature of the device. Models should not be too realistic, as this may lead customers to gravitate towards comments on implementation specific features. Customer and user must be able to assess the model against the user needs statements – the VOC.
Early confirmation occurs before the development of the concept elaboration. An early play back of the Super Concept output, when some uncertainty exists, can avoid churn and rework during formal requirements generation. At this point, the painstaking work of requirements elaboration has not started, and this early concept confirmation can minimize the rework of the requirements because of concept misses.
A set of questions based upon VOC and user needs allows the effective evaluation the final concept. These questions should be in the same Likert scale format as the VOC.
The figure below illustrates a radar chart showing the customers evaluation of the concept against the original needs, with the target and best-in-class scoring as benchmarks. From this chart, a comparison of concept scores to the initial target and the best-in-class scores developed during VOC generation identifies gaps and issues. In this example, some of the targets have not been met. The team must decide whether to adjust the target or to undertake another round of concept development. Often target adjustment takes place, but this adjustment must take place in a structured manner, with the CTQs and concepts re-evaluated against the revised target.
Further Reading
| Topic | Reference |
| Likert Scales | Vanek, C. (2012, April 24). Likert Scale – What is it? When to Use it? How to Analyze it? Retrieved from SurveyGizmo: http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/likert-scale-what-is-it-how-to-analyze-it-and-when-to-use-it/ |