P²aE – Adaption of agile development approaches for physical product development

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Kristin Paetzold-Byhain
• Subject Area: Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 408907243

Globalized markets, short technology and product life cycles cause uncertainty and volatility in product development projects. If the project team does not consider those, budget overruns and deadline shifts will be inevitable in general. These effects intensify especially when it comes to complex technical systems because based on their complexity and number of inherent dependencies they are even for experts hard to overlook. As one component changes (e.g. new insights concerning the system’s behavior requires revisions of design assumptions), it will create far-ranging consequences on components that seemed irrelevant at first. Conventional project management tends to predict uncertainty and volatility at the project beginning. This is why the project team profoundly analyses i.a. the market needs and the technical feasibility. The project plan finally manifests the results of this phase and suggests that the project can be successful when every project team member sticks to the plan. This, however, is a momentous misinterpretation in uncertain and volatile development contexts since future changes are not entirely predictable by heuristics or forecasting methods, not to mention avoidable or hedge-able. Agile developing, which stems from software development and diffuses gradually to other domains, bases upon a different paradigm: On the one hand, changes are considered unpredictable and, on the other hand, do not per se harm the project. In contrast, they can open up new options and opportunities to secure a competitive advantage. By designing prototypes in highly frequent cycles (1 – 4 weeks) that are tangible and experience-able for the customer, the development team learns continuously through the customer feedback which product aspects should be improved in order to be attractive to the customer, economically viable and technically feasible. Caused by the constraints of physicality (e.g. costs and time effort to build prototypes) the adaption of agile approaches to physical product development is not trivial. That is why the project goal is the investigation of how the agile approach is applicable in physical product development (non-software industries), which adaptions are required and which kinds of prototypes (paper prototypes, laboratory set-up etc.) are appropriate for agile physical product development. For that purpose, the project follows the grounded theory research approach and uses the lead user method to identify and learn via case studies from users of agile methods being ahead of the bulk.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants