Modeling and analyzing concurrent processes for project performance improvement

Abstract

Competitive industrial market has created a highly challenging environment for product development. Developing products faster, better, and cheaper than competitors has become critical to success. In response to these pressures, many industries have shifted from a sequential development paradigm to a concurrent paradigm. Increasing the concurrency, however, also increases the complexity of development projects. Our literature review shows that there is a lack of methods to explicitly model and analyze concurrent development processes. Through analytical and simulation approaches, this thesis investigates and suggests policies for managing concurrent processes, and assesses the optimal overlapping degree, communication frequency, and functional interaction level for the projects with different properties. The impact of project characteristics (such as project uncertainty, rework rate, and communication cost) on development policies is analyzed in an attempt to uncover insights on appropriate management of development projects within a given context. The usefulness and validity of the insights, analytical results, and algorithms proposed in this research have been validated with product development case studies in three consumer electronics companies.