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Organizing Development Projects: Structural Choices and Planning Approaches

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Product Innovation Management

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals ((MANAGPROF))

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Abstract

Product development projects represent a considerable organizational challenge. Coordination and collaboration problems are amplified by a variety of factors: the multitude of disciplines and skills required, the strong and growing pressure on time reduction and the level of uncertainty and risk that typically characterizes product innovation.

This chapter focuses on the set of organizational choices that influence the way people interact during a specific product development project. These choices deal with (1) the definition of the organizational structure that formalizes roles and power relations and (2) the adoption of specific planning and control methodologies for project activities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wheelwright and Clark (1992a, b, c).

  2. 2.

    In some companies the project team is identified as a “simultaneous engineering team”, to emphasize the importance of early involvement of different business functions and the need for constant interdisciplinary integration; see Barkan (1991).

  3. 3.

    Schwaber and Sutherland (2020).

  4. 4.

    Siebdrat et al. (2009).

  5. 5.

    McDonough et al. (2001).

  6. 6.

    See Kerga et al. (2013).

  7. 7.

    See the classic work by Larson and Gobeli (1988).

  8. 8.

    Ballé et al. (2016)

  9. 9.

    Ward and Sobek II (2014).

  10. 10.

    McDonough (2000).

  11. 11.

    For a classification of project planning and control systems, see Wysocki (2014). For a broad description of classical planning and control methodologies, see Baglieri et al. (1999).

  12. 12.

    The refinement of the rational project planning approach did not stop at the PERT methodology; in fact, other even more complex methods were developed such as GERT and Q-GERT; see, for example, Taylor III and Moore (1980).

  13. 13.

    De Meyer et al. (2001).

  14. 14.

    Traditional techniques are suitable for managing large projects with low uncertainty and high cost-of-change; in such contexts, several project management software packages based on CPM or PERT algorithms are widely adopted (see Wysocki 2014).

  15. 15.

    Critical path thinking has also been challenged by proponents of the critical chain method, based on Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. This methodology remains within the rational paradigm and proposes a buffer-based, as-late-as-possible scheduling technique (see Leach 1999, 2004).

  16. 16.

    See Sting et al. (2015).

  17. 17.

    See Rigby et al. (2016).

  18. 18.

    See www.agilealliance.org.

  19. 19.

    Takeuchi and Nonaka (1986).

  20. 20.

    See Wysocki (2014) and Deemer et al. (2010).

  21. 21.

    Schwaber and Sutherland (2020).

  22. 22.

    In addition to the Scrum Board, another critical tool for the daily monitoring of the Sprint progress is the Burndown Chart, which illustrates in an X-Y graph the trend of the remaining workload (y-axis) for each day of the Sprint (x-axis), based on the estimated effort of each planned task to complete the Sprint Backlog. A typical Burndown Chart highlights both the “standard” line of linear absorption of the amount of work and the actual line of the amount of work remaining to be done in the Sprint. If the actual line is placed above the standard line, it means that the team is proceeding at a slower pace than estimated and may not meet the project commitments made.

  23. 23.

    See Sommer et al. (2015), Ovesen and Sommer (2015), Cooper (2016) and Cooper and Sommer (2016)

  24. 24.

    Ulrich et al. (2020) define a prototype an “approximation of the product along one or more dimensions of interest”.

  25. 25.

    See Radeka (2017, 2019).

  26. 26.

    See Cooper and Sommer (2018).

  27. 27.

    See Hines et al. (2006), Mascitelli (2011), Lindlöf and Söderberg (2011), Bertilsson and Wentzel (2015), Gingnell et al. (2012), Lindlöf et al. (2013), Stenholm et al. (2016). A specific implementation of visual planning is the knowledge intensive/visible planning (KI/VP) methodology developed by the consulting firm JMAC; see Chap. 18 of the book by Koudate (2003), written by Takashi Tanaka; see also Hines et al. (2006), Tanaka (2005) and Horikiri et al. (2008).

  28. 28.

    Morgan and Liker (2006); see also Horikiri et al. (2008).

  29. 29.

    Mascitelli (2011) and Oosterwal (2010).

  30. 30.

    See, for example, Ward and Sobek II (2014).

  31. 31.

    Koudate (2003); Hines et al. (2006); Mascitelli (2011).

  32. 32.

    It should be pointed out that the term “Kanban” also identifies a particular project management methodology developed by Anderson (2010); in the context of the “Kanban methodology”, the Kanban Board is a tool used to visualize workflow and the WIP (work in progress) limit of each process phase (see Kniberg and Skarin 2010). In this book, we have used the term Kanban Board to identify a generic workflow-oriented visual board.

  33. 33.

    See Morgan and Liker (2018).

  34. 34.

    See Terwiesch et al. (2002).

  35. 35.

    Balckburn (1993).

  36. 36.

    Moore (1991).

  37. 37.

    Terwiesch et al. (2002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padua, Padova, Italy

    Stefano Biazzo & Roberto Filippini

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  1. Stefano Biazzo
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Biazzo, S., Filippini, R. (2021). Organizing Development Projects: Structural Choices and Planning Approaches. In: Product Innovation Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75011-4_8

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