How do you get “design agility?” PTC is happy to tell you their answer, at www.ptc.com/go/agility. As for my answer: It’s complicated. I will tell you what I think a good first step would be:
Use tools that can take advantage of the knowledge and data that you have.
If that’s too obscure, let me put it in the context of CAD:
- It’s important that your CAD software is able to open and edit the data you have, no matter the source of that data. If you’re fortunate enough to be in a situation where everyone associated with a project is using exactly the same suite of software, of the same version, then you probably don’t need to sweat this too much. But for those of us who live in the real world—where people use a lot of different tools, and interoperability is still a challenge—it can be a big deal.
- It’s important that you are able to meaningfully edit the CAD data you have, even if you don’t know how it was constructed. To put a finer point on it: what you know is what it looks like, and what you want it to look like; what you often don’t know is how it is structured (e.g., the hidden relationships built into the feature tree.) It’s important that you CAD software allow you to edit the that data, without you needing to take the time to discover and make sense out of its structure.
