Exploring the Relation Among Product Complexity, Team Seniority, and Project Performance as a Path for Planning New Product Development Projects: A Predictive Model Applying the System Dynamics Theory

Abstract

For complex new product development (NPD) projects, traditional planning techniques have failed in realistic planning. Consequently, project performance has poor results, despite the dissemination of project management knowledge. This research aims to investigate the relationship between product complexity and team seniority as planning parameters for the NPD project, exploring the effect on project performance. The research applies a system dynamics model for simulating the influence of these parameters on project performance, particularly relating schedule and scope dimensions. In this article, we compare the impact of different relations between product complexity and team seniority on three projects in order to test the method. Only the product primary functions must be taken into account for gathering data from product complexity, and team seniority must be known. Besides, the decision-maker applies a first-order linear model to a goal-seeking background to predict the project schedule for a specified product scope. The results show that the model predicts the project schedule performance with an error of less than 15%, as compared to the actual projects’ performance.