ویژگی بر اساس چارچوب فرایند برای مدیریت دامنه در پورتفولیوهای NPD پویا

The need to develop new products in increasingly frequent cycles of innovation drives organizations to form new product development (NPD) portfolios. In such dynamic environments, organizations need to reinforce their capabilities to deal with the simultaneity of multiple NPD projects, as well as with the frequent changes of the product scope. Many organizations, that have adopted the typical NPD process enforcing a streamlined product development process, are challenged beyond strict planning and rigorous control of their NPD projects. This paper identifies the challenges to manage the scope of a complete portfolio of NPD projects within the dynamic context that organizations face today, and using existing scope management practices. This paper suggests a novel approach to structuring the scope in dynamic NPD portfolios using feature modeling, and illustrates its use in an action-research case.

In order to sustain competiveness, companies need to create a continuous flow of products that generate new revenue streams, and also need to address the evolving customer needs. For that purpose companies often need to adopt a multi-product strategy and define a roadmap for innovative products and extensions (Tabrizi and Walleigh, 1997) to cover existing market opportunities that needs to be continuously adapted to the turbulences affecting the company's product portfolio scope (Suomalainen et al., 2011). In more dynamic environments, such as high technology products, the impact of scope change is so high that scope definition becomes a continuous evolution. While a single product development can in certain turbulent environments be by itself already quite challenging, companies very often embark on the development of multiple products that are started one after another, with a high degree of parallelism. Furthermore, in a multi-product company product features and architecture components are interdependent causing scope changes in a specific product to be propagated to other on-going developments, triggering change events throughout several other projects. In this context the complexity in managing the scope of a NPD portfolio grows exponentially, which makes it critical for managers to have the tools to quickly gain visibility of the change effects across the multiple development projects such that wrong development paths can be avoided, minimizing the costs of rework. Some companies adopt multi-project based processes such as the project portfolio management standard (PMI, 2008a) defined by PMI, to gain oversight of the execution of the NPD projects. However, these processes mostly focus on project prioritization and resource allocation, and do not provide the overview of project scope and dependencies among NPD projects. The importance of managing multiple NPD project scopes has been highlighted in some top management and business journals on project management (Kwak and Anbari, 2009), and where a predominant occurrence of articles in related topics such as portfolio management, marketing and R&D of new products is noticeably traceable. The objectives of this paper are to summarize the challenges that companies still face to manage the scope of an NPD portfolio and to propose a new scope management process framework based on feature oriented domain analysis (Kang et al., 1990). The paper uses a real case of a semiconductor company to illustrate the challenges and the suggested scope management practices. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature on NPD portfolio management and methods to manage its scope; Section 3 describes the research methodology adopted in this paper; Section 4 analyzes a company case to identify the challenges of managing the scope of a new product line; Section 5 describes the identified challenges of managing the NPD portfolio scope; Section 6 integrates the new scope management processes in the NDP portfolio management context; Section 7 discusses the resulting propositions and reflects on limitations and advances some clues on future research; Section 8 provides the conclusions of this research.

A NPD portfolio is constituted by NPD projects that are interrelated, not only because they share the same resources, but also because there are relationships between the various technical components and versions of products. As such, the management of product scope is the foundation of any NPD project, and is extremely complex in engineering project designing products that are naturally interconnected, either through components, or by the technical challenges that they share. Additionally, the constant pressure for innovation means not only that the NPD project scope should be seen as something that is dynamic (Beaume et al., 2009), but also that portfolio managers need to ensure that changes in scope is spread throughout the various NPD project part of the company's portfolio to maintain the desired alignment in innovation (Taylor and Levitt, 2007). This paper identifies and describes challenges when managing NPD project portfolios and details a portfolio scope management process framework based on feature modeling that can be integrated into the processes and activities described by the PMI standards (PMI, 2008a, PMI, 2008b and PMI, 2008c). The proposed portfolio scope management process defines a simple and fully flexible framework to scope new NPD project through the selection of the nodes of the structure of features. This structure of features represents the various types of relationships between features, allowing a more detailed analysis of the relations between ongoing projects, and the potential of reuse of product artefacts already developed (Weber and Reiser, 2007) and that pertain to a common platform of products (Chao and Kavadias, 2008 and Cooper, 2008). This type of structure and method for managing information associated with the scope of the portfolio allows decisions to be taken with better information about the developments and, where necessary, to visualize alternative solutions, which will naturally improve the adaptability of the portfolio product development (McCarthy et al., 2006).