CH.11: PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Create Milestones

Team Under One Roof:• Teaming up people from various disciplines minimizes paperwork

and meetings and maximizes informal discussions• Informal decision-making between parallel teams also enhances the

team’s “ownership” of the decision and ultimately the product• Team members own a decision more readily than when they

communicate from one area to another, one building to another, or possibly from one city to another

• This type of strategy permits simultaneous engineering, which is simply bringing involved personnel together every day to proceed with their assignments and work more smoothly

• Extending the simultaneous engineering idea is computer aided engineering (CAE), which permits the engineers to design, test and analyze new components simultaneously before building the prototype. This saves time and money and improves the overall quality of the component.

Team Under One Roof (Contd.)

• CAE, with centralized work stations, enhances the under-one-roof concept by allowing all of the work to be to be done in one in one location rather than in several different areas. The time saved can be used to examine more alternatives

• Real-time project management enhances the under-one-roof concept by allowing team members to know exactly where they are in the project at any given (project status) and to deal immediately with any barriers to achieve project goals. Real-time project management begins with setting goals and preparing a project planning diagram.

Concept to Market: Product Planning Cycle

• The concept-to-market (CTM) cycle with the team under one roof is aimed at bringing the product to market faster, more efficiently, and with higher quality

• Companies that have used this approach have seen reductions in time, costs, and defects through improved communications, simultaneous engineering and real time problem solving and decision making

• Mounting a successful product introduction to meet customers’ requirements needs to be done in expilicit development stages

• Such an approach allows the project to be checked at defined intervals

• Measuring progress with major milestones that are established at the start or end of each phase will provide excellent project control

Concept to Market: Product Planning Cycle (Contd.)

• Different companies use different versions of product planning cycles, all tailored to the company’s structure and to the nature of the product to be marketed

• Intense competition among product-oriented firms has resulted in continuous revisions to product development cycles – primarily quality improvements and reductions in cycle time

• Auto manufacturers have been especially active in striving to improve quality and reduce cycle time, using methods of selected japanese and US manufacturers as benchmarks

• To prepare the entire milestone schedule, the project team will identify the major activities within each phase that are needed to complete that specific phase.

• When scheduling the project, these dates, known as interim milestones, become important for maintaining control