From Project to Process Management: An Empirically-Based Framework for Analyzing Product Development Time

Paul S. Adler, Avi Mandelbaum, Viên Nguyen and Elizabeth Schwerer
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Paul S. Adler: Department of Management and Organization, School of Business Administration, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1421
Avi Mandelbaum: Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa, Israel 32000
Viên Nguyen: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Elizabeth Schwerer: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5015

Management Science, 1995, vol. 41, issue 3, 458-484

Abstract: While product development efforts are often viewed a unique configurations of idiosyncratic tasks, in reality different projects within an organization often exhibit substantial similarity in the flow of their constituent activities. Moreover, while most of the planning tools available to managers assume that projects are independent clusters of activities, in reality many organizations must manage concurrent projects that place competing demands on shared human and technical resources. This study develops an empirically-based framework for analyzing development time in such contexts. We model the product development organization as a stochastic processing network in which engineering resources are "workstations" and projects are "jobs" that flow between the workstations. At any given time, a job is either receiving service or queueing for access to a resource. Our model's spreadsheets quantify this division of time, and our simulation experiments investigate the determinants of development cycle time. This class of models provides a useful managerial framework for studying product development because it enables formal performance analysis, and it points to data that should be collected by organizations seeking to improve development cycle times. Such models also provide a conceptual framework for characterizing commonalities and differences between engineering and manufacturing operations.

Keywords: new product development; project management; process management; development cycle time; processing network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
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