Abstract
Engineering product development efforts have often been studied as though they consisted of independent and idiosyncratic projects. In reality, however, many product development organizations do not rely on fullydedicated teams, so their projects suffer delays when resources have to support more than one project concurrently. Moreover, in many product development organizations, projects often exhibit important similarities with previous projects. While PERT models allow the characterizations of independent and idiosyncratic projects, a more realistic model of development organizations would therefore represent them as stochastic processing networks in which engineering resources are “workstations” and projects are “jobs” that flow among the workstations. This paper describes the managerial issues involved in applying such a process approach to product development, and the methodological issues in modeling development time with this approach. We identify these issues through a field-based research project.
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