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

Many organizations must manage concurrent projects that place competing demands on shared human and technical resources. An empirically based framework for analyzing development time in such contexts is developed. The product development organization is modeled 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 queuing for access to a resource. The model's spreadsheets quantify this division of time, and the 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