| The objective of this research is to develop a risk management framework for Research and Development (R&D) projects that can facilitate early involvement of all stakeholders, phase-wise review, and incremental implementation. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was applied as the methodology to establish a three-phase risk management framework for R&D projects that consists of the Risk Assessment, Risk Analysis, and Risk Handling Phases.; The Traveling Wave Motor Research and Development Project, a joint research project of the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR), and Allied-Signal Inc., Kansas City Division, was selected as the case project for evaluating the developed risk management framework. Student teams, formed from volunteer senior and graduate students of UMR's Engineering Management Department, performed the evaluation experiments. The experiment sessions were conducted on two different platforms: QFD Plus and GroupSystems. In addition to information on decision performance, a questionnaire was used to gather information on decision perception.; The evaluation results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed risk management framework. On both implementation platforms, participants recorded high ratings for decision perception. No significantly statistical difference was observed in the decision perception of teams on two different platforms. On average, the teams on the GroupSystems platform generated more outputs but spent more time than those on the QFD Plus platform. Further work should examine the performance of an integrated QFD/GroupSystems framework in addressing group decision-making in several domains. |
