Thinking Beyond Lean: How Multi Project Management is Transforming Produ - Softcover

Kentaro, Nobeoka A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439101779 ISBN 13: 9781439101773

Verlag: Free Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Lean Thinking has dominated product development and project management for over a decade. Now, however, a six-year study by MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program led by Michael Cusumano and Kentaro Nobeoka finds that, in order to dramatically improve product portfolios, Toyota and other leading companies are moving beyond single-project management on which lean thinking is based. In Thinking Beyond Lean, Cusumano and Nobeoka show that single-project management can produce isolated hit products and "fat" designs that contain few common components and many unnecessary parts and features. As a result, in this era of slowing growth and falling profits, leading companies are maximizing their investment by utilizing a groundbreaking concept the authors call "multi-project management." Drawing on a data base of 210 automobile products and detailed case studies from Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Renault, and Fiat, the authors demonstrate how product development teams can share engineers and key common components but retain separate designers to maintain distinctive product features. The result: multi-project management has brought these companies huge savings in development and production costs.
Cusumano and Nobeoka's findings will be required reading for every company that makes more than one product. Taking up where The Machine That Changed the World left off, Thinking Beyond Lean will change the way leaders do business now and in the future.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael A. Cusumano is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. A leading expert on the strategic management of technology, Professor Cusumano is co-author of Microsoft Secrets and the author of The Japanese Automobile Industry and Japan's Software Factories.

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Chapter One

Introduction: Beyond "Lean" in Product Development

This book is about how to manage product development more strategically and efficiently. We talk about multi-project management and the benefits this kind of thinking can bring to projects and to companies. The basic idea is to create new products that share key components but to utilize separate development teams that ensure each product will differ enough to attract different customers. If possible, projects that share components and engineering teams should overlap in time so that a firm can deliver many products quickly and utilize very new technologies. The evidence we have suggests that, if they follow these principles, firms can achieve dramatic improvements in performance -- huge savings in development costs (engineering hours) as well as remarkable growth in sales and market share. The examples and data we present are mainly from the automobile industry. The ideas, however, apply to many companies that have more than one product and want to expand the number of new products rapidly and efficiently.

Managers, in our view, have a simple choice: They can manage new product development as if each project and product exists in isolation -- and possibly maximize their chances of delivering something fast and producing a "hit." Or, they can view each development project as part of a broader portfolio of projects-existing in the past, present, and future (Figure 1-1). If they follow multi-project thinking, then they can try to maximize the chances that the organization will produce a stream of new products that cover a range of market segments and make the best possible use of R&D investments.

KEY QUESTIONS

How to manage more than one project at a time is no simple matter, especially for companies that have many product lines, many projects to coordinate, and complex products with many components. Automobile manufacturers provide particularly excellent cases to study because of the challenges they face. They generally have numerous product lines and lots of projects ongoing simultaneously. Their products contain 30,000 or so components and usually take a million or more engineering hours per project to develop. The actual time and cost needed to create an automobile depend on how fast companies go through the different steps required. This speed, in turn, depends at least in part on how much they overlap functional activities such as concept generation (deciding what to design), product planning (determining product specifications and how a new product fits with other products), advanced engineering (coordinating the development of major components such as engines or transmissions with particular projects), product engineering (creating detailed designs for components and subsystems), process engineering (designing equipment and techniques for manufacturing), and pilot production (low-volume experimental manufacturing).

A critical decision for automobile companies, or any company building a complex product with many components or subsystems, is whether or not to organize groups around functional activities or around projects that bring together people from the different functions or component areas. Most auto makers have moved toward a mixture of functional groups and projects (or clusters of projects, which we refer to as "development centers"). In doing so, all companies have debated how to balance what is optimal for the individual project versus what is optimal for the organization as a whole. In our discussions, we break down this problem into several issues, such as:

• Which functions should companies keep centralized to take advantage of scale and scope economies by providing engineering services and components (such as body design or engine technology) to more than one project?
  
  
• Which functions should companies disperse among projects in order to maximize the distinctiveness and innovativeness of the individual products?
  
  
• How much authority over budgets and personnel should a project manager have versus managers of functional departments?
  
  
• To what extent should companies seek a balance of functional with project management by grouping related projects together and then sharing some technologies as well as functions at least for clusters of similar projects?
  

We try to provide answers to these and other questions. We base our arguments on detailed case studies and interviews with managers and engineers, as well as extensive analyses of data we have collected on automobile development projects and company performance. Before we discuss our results, however, we need to explain the background behind our concern for multi-project as opposed to single-project management in product development.

LEAN PRINCIPLES AND SINGLE PROJECTS

Most writings on best-practice in product development refer to single projects. This is true of Product Development Performance (1991) by Clark and Fujimoto, who first collected quantitative data from auto makers at the individual project level. This is also true of The Machine That Changed the World (1990) by Womack, Jones, and Roos, which summarized concepts that leading auto makers use to manage product development as well as manufacturing more efficiently. To characterize these "best practices," The Machine That Changed the World also used the word lean, a term coined by John Krafcik, who was a master's student at MIT in the mid-1980s. A more recent book, Lean Thinking (1996) by Womack and Jones, has extended some of these ideas about efficiency and eliminating waste to the organization of companies and operations more generally.

Lean refers to a general way of thinking and specific practices that emphasize less of everything-fewer people, less time, lower costs. In product development, firms around the world in many industries now follow many of the lean concepts discussed in the books we have just cited (Table 1-1). Two especially important principles, which Clark and Fujimoto highlighted in particular, are the following: (1) overlapping different functional activities or development phases, such as concept generation, product engineering, and process engineering; and (2) using relatively independent product teams led by "heavyweight" project managers. The product teams usually bring together people from different engineering functions as well as marketing, and in this sense are cross-functional in organization. In addition, the heavyweight project managers generally have extensive control over product concepts as well as the people and budgets involved in component engineering, production preparations, and marketing. As a result, they have the ability to create distinctive new designs and then quickly move product concepts through the development process and into manufacturing.

Other lean principles also contrast with the use of more traditional functional management practices in product development. In more traditional functional companies, for example, each engineering department tends to have a strong manager who hands off work to other departments, often in a sequential manner. This approach contrasts with relatively short, overlapping phases and crossfunctional teams guided by a strong project manager.

There is no doubt that lean thinking has significantly improved project performance. During the 1980s, for example, many Japanese auto makers used heavyweight project managers, overlapping phases, and other techniques when they replaced and expanded their product lines nearly twice as often as U.S. and European companies. As seen in Table 1-2, the Japanese required only about two-thirds of the lead or calendar time required for the average project (about 45 months compared to 60...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Free Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1439101779
• ISBN 13: 9781439101773
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland