Abstract—Many firms expend a great amount of effort to increase the customer value of their product development (PD) processes. Yet, in PD, determining how and when value is added is problematic. The goal of a PD process is to produce a product “recipe ” that satisfies requirements. Design work is done both to specify the recipe in increasing detail and to verify that it does in fact conform to requirements. As design work proceeds, certainty increases surrounding the ability of the evolving product design (including its production process) to be the final product recipe (i.e., technical performance risk decreases). The goal of this paper is to advance the theory and practice of evaluating progress and added customer value in PD. The paper proposes that making progress and adding customer value in PD equate with producing useful information that reduces performance risk. The paper also contributes a methodology—the risk value method—that integrates current approaches such as technical performance measure tracking charts and risk reduction profiles. The methods are demonstrated with an industrial example of an uninhabited combat aerial vehicle. Index Terms—Lean, performance measurement, product development, project management, risk management, systems engineering, value stream. I.

We define and develop a solution approach for planning, scheduling and managing project efforts where there is significant uncertainty in the duration, resource requirements and outcomes of individual tasks. Our approach yields a nonlinear optimization model for allocation of resources and available time to tasks. This formulation represents a significantly different view of project planning from the one implied by traditional project scheduling, and focuses attention on important resource allocation decisions faced by project managers. The model can be used to maximize any of several possible performance measures for the project as a whole. We include a small computational example that focuses on maximizing the probability of successful completion of a project whose tasks have uncertain outcomes. The resource allocation problem formulated here has importance and direct application to the management of a wide variety of project-structured efforts where there is significant uncertainty.

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and present a comprehensive survey of the literature published in the last decade. To organize our survey, we use a framework based on the

Regular Paper This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system that can be engineered. However, while product systems must be created, the process systems for developing complex products must, to a greater extent, be discovered and induced. Then, they tend to be reused, either formally as standard processes, or informally by the workforce. We distinguish and clarify several important concepts in modeling processes, including: product development versus repetitive business processes, descriptive versus prescriptive processes, activities as actions versus deliverables as interactions, standard versus deployed processes, centralized versus decentralized process modeling, “as is ” versus “to be ” process modeling, and multiple phases in product development. We also present a basically simple yet highly extendable and generalized framework for modeling product development processes. The framework enables building a single model to support a variety of purposes, including project planning (scheduling, budgeting, resource loading, and risk management) and control, and it provides the scaffolding for knowledge management and organizational

Product innovation is a subtle process, frequently leading to shifts in the competitiveness of firms. Developing products in an environment undergoing technological change is given to frequent failure, even in well-established and sophisticated organizations. In order to tackle competitiveness and to deal with innovation uncertainty, firms develop diverse innovation processes. Two modes of innovation are suggested in recent literature: 1) Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) mode, which is based on the production and use of codified scientific and technical knowledge; and 2) Doing, Using and Interacting (DUI) mode, which relies on informal processes of learning and experience-based know-how. In this paper we analyse product innovation at firm level. We perform an exploratory analysis in four leading equipment and machinery producers from the Aveiro region, in Portugal. Doing so, we explore the main features of the capital goods ’ industry with implications for innovation, and analyse the dominant uncertainties associated to the innovation process. and modes of innovation. Key findings include the complete absence of DUI mode in the cases studied, and even a low learning characteristic in one company. The paper concludes by

product development processes and

Companies employ a variety of different product development processes (PDPs) to design new products. Well-designed PDPs are necessary to reduce development time, manage risks, and create better products. This study proposes and demonstrates a method with which a company can design a PDP applicable to its unique circumstance. The research uses several case studies and a literature survey to demonstrate the wide variety of PDPs available to companies. The case studies show the importance of matching PDP design to a company’s risk profile. The paper employs these lessons to propose a method for improved PDP design. The paper then illustrates the method by discussing how one company is using it to redesign its PDP.