Building models of product development processes: An integrative approach to managing organizational knowledge

摘要

The process for designing and developing complex system productsall of the activities performed and the information and other work products producedis essential to innovative and competitive enterprises. This process is dynamic, complex, and complicated, and the people who understand it best are in short supply and may not be around for the next project. For a variety of reasons, models of this process are important to systems engineers and managers. A 2006 paper in this journal discussed key concepts in modeling product development (PD) processes. This paper follows by presenting a general approach to building PD process models, integrative process modeling (IPM), which support a wide variety of purposes, such as providing evidence for external certifications, planning projects and programs, and morebut especially serving as a salient repository for crucial organizational information. Although a centralized team of modeling experts leads the overall IPM endeavor, distributed agents define various processes and activities, thereby capturing PD information across very large organizations. The paper discusses management of the model-building project and subsequent operations, as well as software tool support and model storage. A collection of helpful heuristics guides IPM to help organizations improve the long-term value provided by PD process modeling.