Evaluation of New Product Development Process and Organization A case study of connected solutions company
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Författare
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Master's Thesis
Master's Thesis
Modellbyggare
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Sammanfattning
Customer needs have been changed to experience products as early as possible with similar
or even higher quality products than in the past. Therefore, to align with customer needs, firms'
way of working has changed significantly to increase their velocity and flexibility when
developing products. However, since the way of working is closely related to new product
development (NPD) processes and organizations, merely changing the way of working cannot
meet customer needs. Therefore, these three aspects should be considered when tailoring
NPD processes.
The case company's way of working is continuously evolving to increase not only product
quality but also efficiency by adopting a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to meet customers'
expectations through its NPD process. However, it is important to evaluate whether the current
way of working, the NPD process, and the organization are closely managed together.
However, the case company raises the need to evaluate the current way of working, the NPD
process, and whether the organization is closely managed together, and to find potential
improvements to meet customer needs. Therefore, this study was conducted according to the
request of the case company.
Mixed research combining qualitative and quantitative approaches was adopted to evaluate the
current situation of the case company. The primary source of the research is a qualitative
approach that is in line with interviews and literature reviews, and the quantitative approach
supports findings based on a qualitative approach. The purpose of conducting quantitative
research, which is a survey and a self-completion questionnaire, was to investigate employees’
perceptions. The self-completion questionnaire was aimed at evaluating the current SAFe
maturity level in the case study. After analyzing the data, two benchmarks were conducted to
gain ideas about how other companies are dealing with the challenges faced by the case
company.
The study identified three categories of challenges: process-related, organizational-related,
and knowledge management-related challenges. Furthermore, root cause analysis was
conducted to determine where the challenges derived from the three categories of challenges,
and the identified root causes are the inflexible NPD process, late risk management,
decentralization, lack of customer involvement, and lack of knowledge management. Therefore,
recommendations are based on aiming to decrease time-to-market and increase product
quality to overcome the identified challenges, since time and quality are perceived as the most
important factors when developing a new product at the case company.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
New Product Development (NPD) process, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Agile process, Process tailoring, Agile testing, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Centralization, Decentralization, Ambidexterity, Formalization, Knowledge Management