Product Development: Work for Premium Values

This book is about how teams can keep value-driven product development together and focused in spite of complex organizational settings and changing brand values. Through good leadership, and good team spirit, large projects can maintain their dynamism if people "talk their walk" and thereby coproduce a good story - a story good enough to tell the customer. We will see, increasingly, the story of how the new car model was developed as part of marketing efforts. The brand values, embedded in the story of the heroic efforts made by the project team to accomplish this valuable product, serve as criteria when members choose what solution to propose to the design problems at hand. The good story will visualise the brand values at the same time as it stages the product. The narrative can be a management tool! Yes, we need the bureaucratic structures (target costing, cost reviews, quality assurance) to keep projects within reasonable limits, but those trappings do not create value, nor does an old specification of a product in a changing world. This book provides an implicit attack on the idea of gate systems so prevalent in the academic literature on product development.

Table of Contents:
Part 1. Values and Complexity; Company History is a Primary Source of Values; Development Work Embedded in Complexity; Part 2. The Micro Processes; A Project of Many Micro Processes; First Set of Sequences, Relating to Noise as a Quality Variable Second Set of Sequences, Relating to Project Constraints (Time and Cost); Part 3. What Keeps a Premium Product Project Together? - The Fact That People Want to Participate in the Making of a Good Story! What I Want to do with Part 3 Membership Work What Case Can Be Made for This Argument? Organising Through Communication How Does the Empirical Material Support Such a Construction? Spelling Out the Solution

About the Author :
Sten Jonsson is professor of Scandinavian Management at GRI a research institute of the School of Economics and Commercial Law at Goteborg University. He was the editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Management until recently, and he headed the Scandinavian Academy of Management during its first 7 years. He and his colleagues have been allowed to observe, directly, the management of product development projects at Volvo Car Corporation for several years.