<aside> 🚩 A Design Change Record (DCR) is a document that captures all open issues in a design project, as well as the changes that are implemented to address the issue.

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Overview

Engineering Change Management (ECM) is a crucial part the overall engineering enterprise. It takes at least several hundred engineers to bring a new automobile to market; and over 10,000 to bring an passenger airliner to market. When an organization is so large and complex, literally any engineering change that isn't carefully documented and validated could cause a complete failure of the project, massive economic loss, and widespread harm or death.

ECM is also important for tracking daily developments and insights. It can help you reflect on the nature of your own actions and learn from your mistakes. Finally, it can help you identify and track your mistakes back to their source - which will help you fix them.

And you only learn from your mistakes.

Documenting Issues and Changes

Changes follow from the discovery of Design Issues in a project.

A Design Change Record (DCR) is a document you will use to track issues you identify as well as the changes you implement to address them.

While there are no universal standards for such things, you are encouraged to use a spreadsheet to track issues and changes. Set up the sheet with the following columns:

• Issue number (so every issue has a unique identifier).
• Date on which the issue was first documented.
• Name (surname only) of the team member(s) who discovered the issue.
• Description of the issue. The description may embed links to other documents with further details about the issue.
• Date on which change(s) were performed to address the issue (i.e., when the issue is "closed").
• Name (surname only) of the team member(s) who performed the change(s).
• Description of the change(s).

DCRs are easy to understand but must be written carefully and kept up to date diligently.

Changes that cannot be understood are pointless. All team members should regularly review the DCR for clarity and understandability. Problems must be brought to the attention of the author(s) of the issue or change, and the author(s) must clarify the note as soon as possible.

See Project Reporting Templates for a template for this document. Do not change the formatting of this document.

Note that:

• The column that shows the ISSUE # formats its contents with left leading zeros; e.g., the 13th design issue will appear as 0013.
• Columns that contain dates will format the dates as YYYY-MM-DD.
• Columns that contain text descriptions will wrap their contents to ensure legibility.

However

Noting a Design Issue and resolving that issue are two separate tasks that are done in two separate parts of the Study, Propose, Critique process.

Identifying and documenting design issues is done during the Critique stage of a given pass through the SPC loop.

Addressing design issues is done in a subsequent pass of the SPC loop, during the Study and Propose stages.

Checklist

• Is your DCR shared with your teammates, instructors, and teaching assistant?