Teamwork

Product development is inherently a collaborative activity, involving both internal groups (e.g. Engineering, Marketing, Manufacturing, Sales & Service etc) and external partners (customers, technology suppliers, material/component suppliers, co-development partners, subcontractors, contract manufacturers, sales distributors etc).

Few firms have all the skills and resources to develop technologically complex products themselves. Increasingly, firms choose to concentrate on core technologies and opt to collaborate with others to gain access to complementary skills and resources. Others have experienced downsizing and have little choice but to outsource a number of operations. This may sometimes include design and development activities where the design responsibility for a part or subsystem is either shared or wholly delegated to a third party.

"over the wall"

Figure 1: The "Over the wall" method

Intra-organisational teamwork
Traditionally, many companies have had a strong functional organisation with projects handed off from one department to the next. This has become known as the 'relay race' or 'over-the-wall' method. More recently, companies have adopted a cross-functional approach ('rugby team') where a core team is responsible for taking the project from concept through to delivery. The core team contains representatives of the most important functional groups, and is augmented from time to time with representatives from other areas as required. This may include suppliers where appropriate.

cross-functional core team (from PACE)

Figure 2: Cross-functional core team (based on McGrath (1996)

 

Inter-organisational teamwork
There are many collaborative forms, ranging from equity relationships such as Joint Ventures or Mergers and Acquisitions at one end of the spectrum to straightforward market transactions at the other. Collaborative product development is an intermediate form where design responsibility is split between two (or more) companies. The resultant product is generally marketed by one of the partners, but may also be marketed by others in non-competitive markets.

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Supplier management
Traditionally, supplier management has been a Purchasing responsibility with adversarial or price-based relationships the norm. Increasingly, supplier involvement or partnership is being sought in an attempt to improve the performance of the supply chain. Similar partnerships are emerging in the design chain with various forms of technological collaboration in the product design and development process. Thus design collaborations arise both from the sharing of design and development tasks, and from supplier development or early supplier involvement (ESI). The distinction between these two scenarios is becoming increasingly blurred, as many of the critical issues are common to both.

Improving Collaborative capability
External collaboration is acknowledged to be difficult, but is increasingly being seen to be a fact of life, and the capacity to collaborate successfully can be considered to confer competitive advantage. It has however been recognised that alliances commonly fail because operating managers do not make them work, rather than for technical or contractual reasons. In successful product development collaborations, the contract is seen as a basis for partnership, open to some renegotiation, rather than as a mechanism to guard against mistrust and opportunism. Much is taken on trust in these projects.

More on Managing Product Development Collaborations

balancing trust and contract

Figure 3: Trust v Contract

Further information

  • Bidault F., Despres C. and Butler, C. (1998) Leveraged Innovation: Unlocking the innovation potential of strategic supply. Basingstoke: Macmillan
  • Bruce, Margaret and Jevnaker, Birgit H. (Eds) (1998) Management of design alliances: sustaining competitive advantage, Chichester: Wiley
  • Doz, Y. and Hamel, G. (1998) Alliance advantage: The art of creating value through partnering. Boston, MA:Harvard Business School Press.
  • Duarte, D. and Snyder, N. (2001) Mastering Virtual Teams (second edition), San Francisco:Jossey-Bass
  • Dussauge, P. and Garette, B. (1999) Cooperative Strategy: Competing successfully through strategic alliances. Chichester : Wiley
  • Lamming, R. (1993) Beyond partnership: strategies for innovation and lean supply, New York; London: Prentice Hall
  • McGrath M E, (1996), Setting the PACE in product development: a guide to product and cycle time excellence, Butterworth-Heinemann, USA
  • Macbeth, D. and Ferguson, N. (1994) Partnership sourcing: an integrated supply chain management approach, London: Financial Times: Pitman Publishing

 

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