System Design and Design Planning : an Interaction Identification

Within a project dealing with the development of a software mockup that should support interactions between system design and project planning processes, a study aiming to identify and to characterize these interactions is the object of this communication. First main issues and definitions of the study and related works are summarized. Then an industrial survey of a dozen of companies shows the interests and the main trends of these interactions. In the next sections, five different types of interactions will be described and discussed. Three of them directly depends on the availability of knowledge relevant to design and planning activities and are rather autonomous. The two others are associated with process control, consistency and human decisions. It will be shown that these mechanisms reduce on one side errors and process iterations and, on the other side, increase process control and consistency between design and planning.