OVERVIEW: New product development projects are highly risky technical undertakings. Organizations frequently seek to manage the risk involved using standard risk management procedures, knowing that a ...company that better manages risks is less vulnerable. Nevertheless, NPD projects continue to fail to meet expectations for delivery time, budget, and outcomes. In this paper, we explore reasons why, despite employing self-evidently correct risk management procedures, adversities occurred in 19 major information systems projects. Project managers focused on the familiar, the measurable, the favorable, the noncommittal, and the controllable while excluding other risks that significantly affected their project performance. We have characterized this tendency as a series of five lures that leave projects vulnerable to risks.
Reducing cycle times, managing costs, and improving project management are key to competitive advantage. This paper introduces an approach known as the dependency structure matrix (DSM) and discusses ...using the DSM to design project plans that produce greater concurrency and better iteration management. The DSM focuses management attention on the essential information transfer requirements of a project: finding essential tasks vital to begin early, developing project plans having improved throughput, removing unnecessary iteration, and simplifying project reviews, while at the same time preserving or improving deliverable quality. A DSM helps us decide what to assume and how and when to plan project reviews. Assumptions are among the greatest sources of project risks. Making assumptions and their dependencies explicit is the key to controlling risk.
In product development (PD) organizations, coordinating technical dependencies among teams with different expertise in overlapping processes is a fundamental challenge. This article takes a more ...sophisticated approach than prior methodologies to improve coordination via organizational clustering, by accounting for both team structural and attribute similarity from the perspective of social network analysis. We built models to quantify the impact of the overlapping processes on the interaction strength among PD teams, which we then used to construct structural similarity by combining tie strength and social cohesion among teams via the design structure matrix. To evaluate the organization network, we propose social embeddedness-related centrality indices within (intracluster) and across (intercluster) team groupings. To facilitate knowledge sharing, we base team attribute similarity on product- and process-related expertise among teams. We integrate the modularity index and an improved silhouette index to find an optimal number of clusters, which we then incorporate with team similarity measures as inputs to a spectral clustering algorithm. An industrial example illustrates the proposed model. The clustering results reinforce several managerial practices but also yield new insights, such as how to measure similarity among teams based on organizational network characteristics and how structural and attribute similarities impact the optimal organizational structure.
This document provides a summary report of the M.I.T. Masters Thesis, "Systematic IPT Integration in Lean Development Programs" by Tyson R. Browning. These studies argue for the inclusion of program ...integration principles as an essential aspect of lean enterprise product development and organization.
Lean Aerospace Initiative
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