Understanding Distributed Product Engineering: Dealing with Complexity for Situation- and Demand-Oriented Process Design

摘要

Due to globalization and driven by shorter product lifecycles, increasing competition and growing customer demands an ever-increasing number of companies are relying on the advantages of globally distributed development networks in order to deal with the challenges that have arisen. This development is additionally propelled by the availability of new technologies supporting communication as well as collaboration in distributed teams. Competence sharing and easier access to global markets are just two of the many advantages that lead companies to put virtual teams into place. On the other hand, distributed teams face additional challenges such as additional coordination effort, loss of physical interaction and longer waiting times. It is particularly these operating conditions that result in a high degree of volatility in the distributed product development process. To respond to the dynamics of the development environment, companies are increasingly trying to act flexibly by implementing agile approaches also in the field of mechatronic systems development to make the process more robust against changes. By addressing agile values like transparency and adaption of process activities during the product development process, the challenges grow with increasing distribution of the development team. In order to homogenize the emerging conflicts in a holistic approach, it is important to understand the influences of the existing characteristics in the development context on agile development. This paper addresses the attributes and their characteristics with which the development context of distributed product development can be described. The description of the required attribute characteristics for the application of a method allows a comparison of the required and the existing development context leading in an indication, which attribute characteristics, of the development context or of the method, have to be adapted. Finally, the influence of the attributes was assigned to the complexity dimensions in order to determine the complexity of the development situation to allow a situation-oriented process alignment regarding the right way to deal with complexities.