Josef Schlattmann - Structure and Organization of Product Development Projects

Translation from the German language edition: Aufbau und Organisation von Entwicklungsprojekten by Josef Schlattmann, and Arthur Seibel, Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland 2017. Published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland. All Rights Reserved.

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Product development projects do not necessarily have to be complex if they are structured and organized in the right way; however, they often become complex when their manageability reaches natural limits or when coordination and project management issues are not clearly defined and comprehensible for all parties involved. In addition, leadership of employees as well as projects must be learned; otherwise, it is usually left to coincidence, and in most university education courses, it still comes up far too short.

The structure of this handbook is based on the organization and process of a product development project, such as those found in medium-sized mechanical engineering companies. The organization concerns all areas directly involved from the idea to the marketable product and includes all the necessary steps (methodical procedure) as well as the associated executing bodies so that the organization can be described as a system in its entirety and the corresponding process as systematic.

Consequently, the importance of a systematic approach to product development cannot be overestimated.

This handbook would like to bring methods proven in industrial practice and taught in numerous lectures and seminars to a larger audience to make the innovation work of the product developer substantially more effective, particularly in small- to medium-sized mechanical engineering companies. The decisive factor here is the insight that new products are not simply generated by designing and organizing but are created by people, since behind the technical difficulties, there are, in fact, always hidden human problems that cannot be overcome by functional measures alone.

To avoid disrupting the flow of reading, we have deliberately omitted the additional formulation of female pronouns. We would therefore like to point out that the exclusive use of the masculine form should of course be understood as independent of gender.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Dr.-Ing. Walter Jorden, the former head of the Laboratory for Engineering Design at the University of Paderborn, on whose Paderborn Design School this handbook is largely based. We would also like to thank the publishing house for the excellent cooperation and printing of this handbook.

Significance: The term product development is used to describe the entirety of activities undertaken to achieve a mature product, starting from a technical task. It comprises the two classic terms development and design, which cannot be clearly separated.

Term formation: The term product development was formed through the increasing application of a systematic and methodical approach to making the earlier more intuitive procedure for developing technical products easier to plan and verify (see Pahl et al., ).

Verifiability of the development: Against the background of quality assurance and changes in product liability, verifiability has gained considerable importance over the past several years. A systematic approach reflects, above all, a step-by-step process with correspondingly manageable steps, while methodical processing aims to achieve the targeted inclusion of methods (i.e., helpful tools).