¶ … Management and Technology
Date (when you are going to hand this in)
(1) (a) What are the pros and cons of concurrent product development? (b) Do the pros outweigh the cons? (c) Why or why not?
The advantages or pros of the concurrent product development model include faster time to market, increased intensity of focus on communication and clarity of direction, more efficient use of limited resources due to constraints needing to be planned for and met, and often a reliance on advanced rapid prototyping techniques as well (Gehani, 1992). In larger organizations where there are multiple projects occurring in conjunction with each other, there is often a greater level of orchestration achieved across all projects given how corporate-wide engineering, product development and quality management all must be managed to a common set of objectives (Gehani, 1992).
Conversely, the disadvantages include greater potential confusion over roles...
What often happens in concurrent product development projects that fail is that the vision and mission often become confused and the many projects being attempted don't get prioritized with the key constraints planned for (Gehani, 1992). Another major challenge of concurrent product development is scope creep and the tendency to underestimate how long the last segment of a project will take to get done. The combination of scope creep and lack of clarity over resource allocations and constraints has made projects nearly 80% complete fail (Gehani, 1992). Concurrent product development also assumes that the same resources will be available across all supporting functions over time, which often turns out to be an erroneous assumption. As a result, supporting systems and processes cannot often cope with multiple products being launched simultaneously unless an organization has budgeted…
