The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

11.4. Suitability of DNPD to Your Development Projects

Despite the spectrum of benefits that DNPD offers, they will only be achieved if the intrinsic of the product or your goals are suited for DNPD. What works for one company may not necessarily work for others. So instead of following the behaviors of other companies, as a rule, each company should evaluate the applicability of DNPD against the three dimensions of product, company, and industry attributes (see Figure 11.2).

11.4.1. Product Attributes

Does the product, and the development steps needed, lend themselves to being distributed? More specifically:

Figure 11-2. EVALUATING USE OF DNPD.

Product modularity:

Is the project modular? Are there discrete components that come together to form the final product?

• The more different and separable the components are, the more applicable DNPD becomes.

Advance specification:

Can the technical requirements and the interfaces or connection points for each of the components be defined a priori, or do they evolve during the development process?

• Well-defined components are most naturally suited to distributed development, though this does not remove the importance of closely monitoring change control procedures.

• Products that are more evolutionary in design process can still be distributed, but require substantial investment in time and support to maintain the levels of interaction ...