Knowledge-oriented process portal with BPM approach to leverage NPD management

New product development (NPD) processes can be improved through change projects managed in a context of business process management (BPM). In order to fully characterize and implement NPD process change projects it is necessary to be able to identify and adequately describe ‘‘to-be’’ processes. These ‘‘to-be’’ processes should be based on best practices, which can be structured into NPD reference models and body of knowledge (BOK). Despite the availability of NPD BOKs today, they are not easily applicable to process improvement, since they are published in on- and off-line guidelines that are unsuitable for dynamic updating by a collaborative network such as a community of practice (CoP). A proposal is therefore put forward for the collaborative systematization of best practices through a two-level portal external and internal to an organization, enabling users to participate in creating generic and public NPD reference models and BOKs. The proposal allows for the selection of a specific reference model and an existing BOK as required. This paper presents the main concepts underlying the proposal and its methodology, which focuses on agile project management (APM). It also describes the portal vision and the main deliverables of this research, with emphasis on the concept of the knowledge-oriented process (KOP) portal. Three prototypes based on this concept are shown, which represent the evolutionary development of the KOP portal. Finally, the main results of the application are presented and discussed. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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