White Paper: Manage Product Development Projects Better

Is There a Better Way to Manage Product Development Projects? 

The last three decades have seen an explosion in project management software tools and certifications for project management methodologies. Terms like agile, resource management, critical path analysis, risk mitigation, etc. are now commonplace throughout the corporate world. However, has all of this attention to the project management discipline resulted in product development executing as planned? For too many companies, the answer is still a resounding “No.”

A study by Engineering.com indicates that there is a significant gap between how manufacturing companies value specific aspects of their project execution and how they judge their performance. Specifically, the study looked at 4 main aspects of managing product development projects:

• Executing the simultaneous launch of multiple variants of a product
• Understanding how requirement changes affect a project’s schedule and resources
• Obtaining accurate and consistent project task updates with proof of completion
• Identifying product development issues that are causing project delays

Across all industries, survey respondents judged their abilities in each of these project management activities to be significantly less than their importance for executing a project successfully. However, it was found that if a respondent combined their project management methodologies with a web-based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution, they judged their performance to be significantly higher.

In order to address these 4 challenging aspects of product development projects, it was concluded that a PLM solution with embedded project management can uniquely provide the following operational best practices:

• Full alignment between projects and the product portfolio in order to leverage common technology platforms and launch products to market faster.
• Coordination of a project’s schedule and resources with its scope as defined by requirements and development constraints in order to meet market expectations.
• Automatic updates of project tasks as development work is completed to have a
  real-time understanding of project status and progress.
• Mitigating project risks based upon real-time status of product development – designs, change orders, defects, etc. – in order to stay on schedule and within budget.

Learn more about the benefits of embedded Project Management with a PLM System in our white paper: