Using Functional Metrics to Facilitate Designing Collectively Exhaustive Mutually Exclusive Systems in the Context of Managing Return on Investment

The objective of this paper is to test two hypotheses in the context of managing return on investment (ROI): (1) that a meaningful functional metric (FM) assigned to every functional requirement could facilitate the design of collectively exhausting mutually exclusive (CEME) systems and (2) that parent functional metrics should equal the sum of their children. FM at every level can facilitate objectively improving a system as well as tracing the root cause of underperformance within a system. Three attempts at designing a quantitative CEME system are critiqued to support or refute the hypotheses. The design attempts increasingly feature FMs with each iteration. Examination of the design attempts supports the hypotheses, however it is unclear whether the hypotheses would prove true outside of the context of ROI. The possibility of incorporating physical metrics into every level of future designs is discussed. This paper is intended to lead to future work testing a metric based decomposition hypothesis.