Planning business processes in product development organisation s
David Wyatt2003
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Abstract
Abstract. Business processes are difficult to plan successfully, and become more so with increases in complexity. However, certain types of business process are known to be more difficult to plan than others. One example is the process of product design, as followed during the development of physical artefacts for production [2]. This form of process is highly complex, uncertain, and non-repeatable; effective methods for design process support must take these factors into account.
Key takeaways
- Within an organisation, many of these operational goals are pursued simultaneously, leading to the concurrent and overlapping execution of potentially large numbers of processes.
- Plans may vary in granularity, from staged models centred on the milestones in a design project through to the detailed workflow plans of a repeatable business process, which may include conditional branches to account for activities with more than one possible outcome.
- Although all goals are in some sense complementary, the limited resource availability within an organisation causes competition between processes.
- Representations of the product design process range in complexity from prescriptive staged models through to elaborate descriptive models based on numerical data.
- They should promote consideration of process context and lead to increased understanding of the relationship between products, processes, and organisation.
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