Managing Product Development Projects: On the Significance of Fountains and Deadlines

Product development in high-technology industries is often carried out in projects. Managing such projects is a matter of both promoting creative knowledge generation processes and controlling progress towards global goals and time limits. From such a dual perspective, we discuss the meaning and suitability of organizing product development projects in a concurrent rather than a sequential fashion and the use of deadlines as control mechanisms. The empirical case is about the breakthrough in Japan for the Swedish company Ericsson. The system was to be fully operative in 1994. This project forced management to reconsider their traditional way of working with projects and to try a new one instead — labelled the 'fountain model' — which relied more on concurrent work and inter-functional cooperation. As a result, they managed to shorten development time quite considerably and deliver the system on time. The fountain model of project organization is interpreted as expressing a 'coupling logic' suitable for error detection in a systemic complexity context. We also suggest a model, identifying four different project organization logics, that may be used contingent upon the type of error problematic and complexity involved. Using the garbage-can metaphor, we also discuss how deadlines and other time-based controls may support the fountain model by promoting inter-functional responsiveness and 'global' reflection.

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