Role: Design Authority

Responsible for overall technical integrity of the design, system or product and the corresponding models and documentation.

Relationships

Design_Authority

Modifies

Main Description

In some industries and organizations this is ultimately a legally responsible role such as for validating industry regulation compliance certification e.g. product compliance or safety.

The Design Authority, or their responsible delegate, will be responsible for defining or validating what exact representation will be worked on and what changes are to be made (at some level of traceable detail).

The Design Authority will have a detailed and wide ranging view of the various aspects of a design, system or product and understand in detail how they relate. For instance towards composition, behavior, performance, risk, usage cost or certification.

The Design Authority is expected to make definitive statements on:

Design, system or product elements to be changed
Applicability of a change to a given design, system or product
Techniques to be employed
Sequence of change
To some degree, ability of the resource to complete the work assigned

Clearly certain of these decision are made in the context of the customer or market need, legacy and prevailing development and will require significant negotiation.

In some industries this role may be titled Chief Engineer, System Architect or System Engineer, assuming their responsibility spans a wide lifecycle, at least during design and acceptance testing.

Staffing

Skills

A person performing this role needs:

Respected technical competence in a business setting
Strong communication skills (both written and verbal)
Effective network into upper & middle management (executive owners)
Effective network into middle management (resource & product owners)
Clear understanding of legal responsibility and the execution for audit or compliance
Sound knowledge systems architecture and design methodologies
Strong relationship with business or product owners and knowledge of the commercial business case
Critical reasoning skills and decision making skills
Strong negotiator and problem solver • Leadership qualities, in order to drive the technical effort across the various teams, make critical decisions under pressure and make those decisions stick
Strong interest and experience for business and technical improvement

Assignment Approaches

The Design Authority increasingly is a collaborative and exploratory role as solutions become complex and multiple parties are involved, to achieve an authoritative position by exchange and negotiation, as there will be multiple people playing this role, or aspects of it.

The Design Authority will primarily be concerned with accuracy and completeness of designs, systems or products.