Developing Products on “Internet Time”: The Anatomy of a Flexible Development Process

Abstract

U ncertain and dynamic environments present fundamental challenges to managers of the new product development process. Between successive product generations, significant evolutions can occur in both the customer needs a product must address and the technologies it employs to satisfy these needs. Even within a single development project, firms must respond to new information, or risk developing a product that is obsolete the day it is launched. This paper examines the characteristics of an effective development process in one such environment-the Internet software industry. Using data on 29 completed development projects we show that in this industry, constructs that support a more flexible development process are associated with better-performing projects. This flexible process is characterized by the ability to generate and respond to new information for a longer proportion of a development cycle. The constructs that support such a process are greater investments in architectural design, earlier feedback on product performance from the market, and the use of a development team with greater amounts of "generational" experience. Our results suggest that investments in architectural design play a dual role in a flexible process: First, through the need to select an architecture that maximizes product performance and, second, through the need to select an architecture that facilitates development process flexibility. We provide examples from our fieldwork to support this view.

Antecedents of project learning and time‐to‐market during new mobile service development

“…Moreover, information quality vanishes when it has to go through many hierarchical layers. Considering the turbulent nature of the telecommunications industry and our case study findings, a flexible and decentralized decision architecture supports a fast and information rich service innovation process in the telecommunications industry (Mendelson and Pillai, 1999;MacCormack et al, 2001). Thus, we suggest that decision-making authority should be co-located where the specific knowledge is available.…”

Structure-based System Dynamics analysis of engineering design processes

“…(Lévárdy & Browning, 2009) Engineering design processes which are capable of coevolving with their environments and dynamic stakeholder needs can profit from the accelerating pace of changing market needs (Dougherty, 2001;Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995). Due to the increasing acknowledgement of uncertainties consideration is given to nontraditional approaches to project management such as extreme (Beck, 1999), adaptive (James a Highsmith & Highsmith, 2013), flexible (MacCormack et al, 2001), response-able (Dove, 2002), lean (Poppendieck & Poppendieck, 2003), agile (Jim Highsmith, 2004) etc.. However, they may not apply as readily for complex hardware systems (Boehm & Turner, 2003).…”

Environmental Volatility, Development Decisions, and Software Volatility: A Longitudinal Analysis

“…The product development literature suggests that environmental characteristics can influence the choice of a development strategy (Brown and Eisenhardt 1995;Krishnan and Ulrich 2001). For example, managers operating in very uncertain and dynamic domains may choose more flexible development processes, and this flexibility allows the products to be changed often so as to stay in synch with their environment (MacCormack, et al 2001). However, there is very little knowledge about ongoing development choices and their impacts on product volatility: Do development choices change as environmental conditions vary over a product's life cycle, and, if so, how?…”