Flexible Project Management for Product Development
by José Campos and Jean-Claude Balland

[Business/Project Management]

Traditional project management approaches are not sufficient for product development due to the complexity of getting a new product to market. Technology changes, personnel turnover, changing customer requirements, multi-site development, and unclear schedules are but a few of the variables that render conventional project management deficient.

Flexible Project Management for Product Development is a unique, downloadable, and fully-interactive electronic guide to allow you and your team to manage your development project in the middle of the turmoil created by global competition. This ebook is an Adobe PDF document that has been designed to be fully interactive; beyond just reading very useful material, you will be able to use the templates and tools and also be able to share the information with your peers around the world.

In addition, this ebook includes several tools specific to product development not available in conventional project management texts; for example, "The Bounding Box" enables cycle time reduction by allowing the team to make better decisions and "The Complexity Diamond" characterizes each development program based on its complexity, thus allowing the team to prepare the right resources to deal with chaos before it starts.

It's a step-by-step how-to guide. The authors realize that in the real world, you need more guidance and
enough detail to enable you to apply this material to your specific development project. It starts by helping you to organize your development project to ensure that you build a robust environment to deal with chaos. We include information on team building and advanced communication skills to enable you to lead the development team - the more chaos, the more you need to rely on your leaderships skills.

The focus of this ebook is on delivering your new product to market to achieve your business objective. Realizing that the purpose of a new product is to improve the profitability of your company, this ebook enables you to focus on the strategy of your new product and focus on delivering measurable results in the midst of confusion.

The material in this book has been field-tested by the authors and by many companies similar to yours. This is not a theoretical book that assumes "best-case-scenarios", which rarely happen in the real world of product development; rather, it equips you to deal with the ever-changing environment of product development particularly when you face a multi-site development project.

Lastly, because this is an enhanced Adobe PDF file, this ebook takes full advantage of hyperlinks, "fillable" forms, interactive templates, and more. You are no longer tied to the old paper model. Plus, you can share the forms, templates and processes with your colleagues around the world.