What’s the “fuzzy front end”? It’s the phase between first consideration of an opportunity and when it’s deemed ready to enter a structured development process. A common characteristic of the “fuzzy front end” is the desire to create and evaluate multiple concept alternatives on the road to selecting a single preferred approach.

It’s pursuing multiple concepts that often pose a special chicken-or-the-egg challenge for engineering because you:

1. Don’t have a complete design to assess feasibility.
2. Can’t fully assess feasibility without a complete design.

This dilemma means engineers must thoughtfully assess competing concepts to identify areas of high risk. They also need to perform sufficient engineering to prove/disprove that a concept can be made to work during a subsequent engineering phase.

Read the full article at MD+DI online.