Goals of Concurrent Engineering execution

One of the most challenging items in the concurrent execution is to achieve effective execution of dependent overlapped activities without losing control of the budgeted costs due to rework as result of discarding preliminary design premises implemented early.

Equally challenging it is to achieve effective recovery of the delay that may present a project in its execution versus schedule at a certain stage of progress (as a Catch Up Plan), without losing control of the costs due to rework.

In both scenarios for controlled execution costs, the following could be implemented:

1. Firstly, a schedule with no overlaps for critical activities (critical path) should be developed.
2. Within critical path with no overlaps, should be identified upstream Fast Evolution activities (upstream activities with fast development that could release the information early to its downstream delivery), upstream Slow Evolution activities (upstream activities with slow development that could release the information late to its downstream delivery), downstream High Sensitivity activities (downstream activity with high exposure or sensitivity to changes in upstream information, involves high risk to rework) and downstream Low Sensitivity activities (downstream activity with low exposure or sensitivity to changes in upstream information, involves medium risk to rework).
3. Introduce overlaps in critical path and proceed to maximize overlaps of upstream Fast Evolution activities with downstream Low Sensitivity activities and reduce overlaps (or none) of upstream Slow Evolution activities with downstream High Sensitivity activities.
4. Then, apply the overlap strategy to reduce design delivery time:
   Preference order:
   - Early freezing of design criteria.
   - Overdesign (based on conservative assumptions).
5. Finally, implementation of control and monitoring of costs due to rework.