Performance Measurement, Goal Setting and Feedback in Engineering Design

There is much evidence that using performance measures for goal setting and feedback improves performance. But there is also evidence that unassisted human judgement is poor at simultaneously evaluating multiple dimensions of performance, that it tends to attribute too little influence on performance to uncontrollable circumstances, and that it does not dependably infer what behaviours cause good and bad outcomes. We report here on the development of a support tool for the engineering design process which: (1) helps design managers methodically identify appropriate outcome measures of performance; (2) gives performance feedback to design groups in terms of a frontier analysis; and (3) assists goal setting by helping design groups infer which behaviours lead to good outcome performance.

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