Project management

Today's business environment is in a state of flux. Production and communication technologies are developing and spreading at great speed. To ensure its long-term survival, every company has to offer the market a constantly renewed range of products and services, incorporating new technological resources and capable of satisfying customers with increasingly precise and diversified requirements. This state of affairs generates fiercer competition between companies, forcing them to produce ever faster. Faced with a highly volatile market, their competitive edge lies in their responsiveness, which translates into shorter lead times between initial product development and market launch.

From idea to market launch, the innovation process is long and complex: it involves a multitude of players in a field of multiple skills and constraints. This process is made up of increments of varying nature and intensity, and its success is mainly the result of its management. In one way or another, it must be integrated into the company's existing production and marketing processes, at a given time and in a given context. The expression "in one way or another" is a convenience that underlines the contingent way in which the mastery of organizational problems can lead to the success or failure of a new product launch.

For the company, the new product represents a disruption to current production operations, with an initial risk of a deterioration in performance indices linked to the testing and fine-tuning required to develop the innovation, as well as to the financial trade-offs and pressures on resource allocation that it entails. Conversely, innovation is its only guarantee for the medium and long term.

The aim of this article is to present the principles and methods used in industry to design and produce new products. It explains how project management accompanies product development from the initial design phase (the idea...) through to the product's operational phase. It presents current trends, which are increasingly based on codified procedures. The aeronautics and space industries have played a pioneering role in the development and dissemination of these procedures. This know-how is gradually permeating other industrial sectors. The wealth of General Recommendations and Standards that have emerged from them is an essential reference. This article draws extensively on these sources.

This article focuses on the fundamental principles of project management applied to industrial products:

• implementation of a process for acquiring successive states of the new product, which consists of :

  • define what is expected of the product in functional terms,...