Modeling the Product Development Process

The process for designing and developing complex system products—all of the activities performed and the information and other work products produced—is 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 managers, engineers, auditors, and other stakeholders. This tutorial presents key concepts in modeling product development (PD) processes and a general approach to building PD process models, integrative process modeling (IPM), that support a wide variety of purposes, such as providing evidence for external certifications, planning projects and programs, and more—but 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 tutorial 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.

PD processes are different from other business processes. Instead of trying to do exactly the same thing repeatedly, PD is about doing something new, once. Hence, methods and tools for process modeling and improvement have to be adapted to fit this context. This tutorial provides a basis for fruitful discussions of these issues within an organization, dispels many common myths and misunderstandings about process modeling and improvement, and will help organizations avoid many hours of time wasted debating many of the difficulties that arise on such journeys. The tutorial is designed especially to help participants do the following in regards to process modeling: (1) understand the motivations, (2) dispel past misconceptions, (3) appreciate the enormous possibilities, and (4) leave as a confident, enthusiastic enabler of their organization's path towards improvement.

The various models and tools used by systems engineers and program managers to plan and manage technical work—such as process flowcharts, Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, and text-rendered procedures—are insufficient for modeling complex PD processes and tend to diverge as a PD project unfolds. A process architecture framework (PAF) manages the complexity in IPM by providing a portfolio of views, each describing the process partially and in a format meaningful to its users and their particular needs. A portfolio of integrated and synchronized views of a single process model is preferable to the current state in many organizations, which have a number of disparate and uncoordinated management models.

The tutorial covers:

• Why companies do process modeling: good reasons and bad ones

• Why PD processes are different from most business processes

• Maintaining and "owning" process models: Who? Why? Roles and responsibilities

• Process modeling frameworks, purposes, and views: how to achieve the right balance of simplicity and completeness in models, while satisfying all stakeholders

• Process architecture framework (PAF): breaking through the model simplicity-completeness tradeoff

• How to build an integrated process model

• How to store a process model in a format that facilitates compliance with varied external standards and assessments (e.g., ISO, CMMI, etc.)

• Using a process model as a basis for knowledge management and organizational learning

• Using a process model for process improvement; relationships with Lean and Six Sigma

• Process tailoring and standardization; common processes across projects/programs

• Using process models in the context of agile project management

• A variety of other uses for process models