A Co-evolution Oriented Change Analysis Framework in Product Development Project

Abstract

Nowadays, companies are facing more and more challenges during Product Development (PD) project. On one hand, the PD project should design and develop the product to satisfy the requirements as far as possible under time, cost and quality constraints. On the other hand, the PD project is expected to deal with any possible modification in an agile and flexible way. Therefore, how to manage changes under various restrictions becomes an essential issue during a PD project. The aim of this paper is to provide some exploratory results concerning modeling change propagations during PD projects to support companies to improve their change management performance. We first propose a Co-evolution Oriented Change Analysis (COCA) framework. The framework enables us to simultaneously model product management, project management, and partnership management knowledge areas as well as the interrelations between them. In the framework, we propose a product evolution model manifesting itself with a serial of states reflecting how the information/data is aggregated along the project process. Relying on the product evolution model as well as the aggregation of information/data from the multiple knowledge areas, we suggest a method of building up a change propagation network. Within the network, we identify and summarize a set of change propagation patterns. Through analyzing the characteristics of the patterns, we suggest some guidelines as a theoretical contribution to change management.