Process

The default form of large-scale organizations has been mechanistic bureaucracy since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Flexible processes have evolved as an alternative to rigid mechanistic procedures in many corporations to permit greater human discretion in product development. Eight subsets of development processes are defined and illustrated. Issues in achieving process excellence are broached. Excerpts from case studies illustrate how each subset of process practices impacts product development performance. Statistics are provided so that readers may compare the percentage of time they deploy eight subsets of process practices vs. the best, average, and the lowest in the SPOT database. Readers may score practices predictive of performance to benchmark themselves against best-in-class (BIC) standards. The Big Bang algorithm may be used to calculate process practices yielding the greatest performance benefit for their enterprise in Appendix Table 6A.Organic forms of organization emerged as an alternative mode of development that opens the exchange of ideas among employees regardless of function and rank. Infusing organic elements into the structure of mechanistic bureaucracies enables composite systems to generate synergistic competitive advantages. Enterprises hybridizing organic freedom with flexible process controls are capable of achieving cost-effective innovation.Organization is the cornerstone of concurrent product development (CPD). Process practices add to the variance organization explains in development performance in two ways. Most process practices have a direct effect on performance over and above that of organization practices. In addition, process synergistically combines with organization to enhance their multiplicative effect, e.g., 1 + 1 = more than two. A hybrid bond between organization and process practices comprises the axis of the composite model. Combinations of eight sets of organization and eight sets of process practices are shown in Table 6.3. Designing a composite of organization and process practices enables enterprises to achieve competitive advantages beyond the solo benefits of either organization or process deployed separately. Readers can optimize their combinations of discrete organization and process practices using Appendix Table 6B.