Product Architecture Management - An Approach to Product Life Cycle

نویسندگان

  • Gaetano Cutrona
  • Andrea Margini
  • Cesare Fantuzzi
چکیده

Today a lot of small, medium and also large companies have a project organizational setup. This means that the major part of the development activities are gathered thru the conduction of a project that at its completion will deliver a new version of the product. In this situation managing versions and resources for some of the product components (subsystems) could be a problem or performed in a non efficient way. This paper shows the approach applied in a company producing machines for the food industry. The methodology is based on the application of PLC (Product Life Cycle) principles aiming at the rationalization of the decisions made during the planning, analysis and implementation phases. The goal of the approach is to help designers and product architects to correlate the needs of projects stakeholders (requirements) with other needs related to the product strategy and roadmap in order to improve efficiency in terms of resource management, product variants and other aspects that affect the life cycle of the product. Introduction Complex products are integrating very different functionalities that are belonging to different technologies and disciplines and must coexist all together in order to achieve the common goal that is a successful product that brings value to the customer and to the company. In order to achieve the above goal a structured company follows different processes to acquire the input needed from the customer, translate them into requirements that are satisfied by the implemented solution. This implies an organization structure that usually consists of projects (responsible for the product delivery) and a set of line organizations (responsible for the product development). The methodology developed will help product (system/subsystem) owner or responsible to efficiently develop a roadmap that will optimize the resource allocation and the releases to the related projects. As mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, usually, a common operational model consists of a project entity (a team lead by a project manager) and one or more development lines (teams lead by line managers). Copyright © held by the authors. The project is responsible for the acquisition of the requirements, control of the planning and deliveries and on the other hand, the lines are responsible for the design of the solutions that will fulfil the requirements received by the project (Figure 1). Figure 1 Project / Line Setup The implication of such organization is that the increasing number of projects is not always increasing consequentially the number of resources available from the lines that have to develop the solutions. So a certain resource has to work in parallel in more than a project. In addition a line have to manage different sets of requirements belonging to different projects that sometimes are conflicting each other or causing reworking due to sequential update of certain functionalities in a product. The detected resulting situation causes big problems in managing the versioning of a certain architecture of product (or component) increasing thus the effort in developments and configurations taken by the lines that are owning it. To support lines in the management of a product a lot of methodologies are available in literature [2], [3], [5]. Most of them consist of prioritisation and classification of requirements performed by the company's marketing organizations or development governances. The outcomes support the decision of what features to include in a certain product. The methodology described in this paper will improve the product architecture management by enabling the line to actively participate in the decisions regarding the solution evolution by directly owning its roadmap. Next section explains the motivation behind such particular methodology. Afterwards the benefits of its implementation are shown by practically describing the case study where this methodology was applied. In the last section the methodology results are discussed and next steps for further improvements are briefly mentioned.

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تاریخ انتشار 2014