Embedding Program Management into PLM — Assessing Added Value

When Program Management & PLM Are Disconnected

• Enterprise-wide visibility into a single repository of real-time program information
• Deployment and use of a common set of stage-gated process definitions
• Improved decision support based on real-time, up-to-date information availability
• Collaborative identification and management of risks, issues and opportunities between program participants
• Increased leverage of global resources
• Process standardization, through templates and integrated process workflows
• Increased re-use of existing designs and legacy IP via integration with PLM documentation
• Simultaneous execution of programs and portfolios of programs

When Program Management & PLM Are Disconnected

Program Management and PLM solutions are each highly effective tools to achieving cost controls, speed to market, R&D efficiencies, and enhanced competitive positioning. Many organizations have implemented technology solutions for Program Management, project management, and PLM to define and enforce decision criteria, processes and procedures. However these tools, processes, procedures and the information within them often exist in isolation of each other, particularly if each is deployed as a point solution. This state of affairs creates delays, re-work, poor collaboration and confusion, while rendering knowledge re-use and leverage across the product lifecycle an impossibility.

For complex products, the product development lifecycle includes execution within multiple disciplines, each consisting of people, budgets, schedules, deliverables, documents and tasks. Figure 3 depicts a typical scenario where information disconnects exist both, within and across disciplines as well as between the product lifecycle phases. Not infrequently, different tools and technologies have been deployed for each of the major disciplines (mechanical, electrical, etc.), making it cumbersome and time consuming for information to be transferred and risking information loss across disciplines. With separate point solutions for the major components of the process loop within a discipline — requirements, design, implement and validate — the resulting discontinuity in data and information flow causes similarly mismatched schedules, delays, errors, and poor decisions.

What Happens If Programs & PLM Systems Are Not Embedded?

In a typical program lifecycle, phases include concept analysis, technology development, engineering and manufacturing development, production, and release to the field. Program Management methodology drives the definition and enforcement of phase gates throughout the lifecycle as appropriate. However, in moving from one phase to the next enterprises are vulnerable to loss of critical information as people are reassigned to the next phase — unless programs are embedded within the PLM environment. While the deliverable from the phase gate is transferred forward to the next phase, the associated documentation (program phase knowledge) of all the numerous decision processes required to generate the deliverable, is left behind. As a consequence, important details relevant to the next phase such as tradeoffs or other program knowledge are lost in memory. Key past phase decisions are at best accessible in high level summary format to staff working on current and future phases; but the information that drove those decisions is absent. In this common scenario, despite the disciplines of Program Management, failure to communicate vital program knowledge between phases constrains the level of efficiency that can be realized. This is particularly problematic in A&D programs where program lifecycles are very long with a multitude of phase transitions within the program.

Another example of the issues associated with disconnected programs and PLM occurs in connection with complexity: complexity of programs with high volumes of documentation and data, and complexity of the supply chain. The challenge is that successful execution of the intense collaboration required by highly complex programs means managing high volumes of information to ensure critical data gets to suppliers and partners while simultaneously protecting appropriate IP. As a result, essential information generated by specific applications remains stored on desk tops (e.g. not accessible to a collaborative team), and other information is communicated via phone and email in an unsecure environment.

Finally, there is the issue of lost efficiencies resulting from poor visibility into in-work deliverables across the enterprise. Specifically a program manager in one location might have included a design document as a phase gate deliverable within a program. When engineering releases the design and stores it in a separate PLM repository, the program manager would not be immediately alerted causing delays while waiting for the formal deliverable gate. In an environment where programs and PLM are configured as silos, Program Managers spend more time looking for information, decreasing their productivity. Moreover, without access to historical documents and knowledge stored in PLM data repositories re-use is virtually impossible. As a consequence design and engineering time is spent reinventing the wheel, or worse repeating the same mistakes. Furthermore having separate Program Management and PLM platforms requires engineers and managers to do “double entry” in multiple applications, increasing the odds of error.

Across disciplines if there is no collaboration or real-time data sharing of current project and product data, teams have difficulty finding the right information at the right time for making the right decisions. In other words, business value is impacted negatively.

Implications For Product Development

Poor Project Visibility & Communication

In many companies project management is still based on manual, paper-based processes. Or, an automated project management system is in place but can only track individual projects in isolation from others. Alternatively, a project portfolio management (PPM) solution may have been deployed that works independently from project management and PLM tools. This makes project status tracking, assessment and reporting highly non-standard and cumbersome. Different project teams are operating according to different processes and procedures. Projects are updated only at chronological intervals and without access to the status of other projects that may be interdependent. From project managers on up to the executive suite, companies lack the ability to view project progress in real-time and in the full context of all other projects. As a result, management decisions are made with partial, outdated information. In this type of environment there is no possibility for early identification of development risks, issues, and opportunities to preempt schedule delays and mitigate financial impact.

Funding the Wrong Projects

Aligning projects with business objectives is essential to success. Without a formal and consistent review process and decision hierarchy, management decisions to fund and prioritize projects are often wrong, resulting in late-to-market products with high costs and low revenues. Corporate management teams require accurate business guidance to foster those products that will result in the greatest success. In the absence of this, projects get funded based on misinformation (e.g. wrong or outdated), politics, or just plain bad estimates. Often companies end up working on non-strategic projects to the detriment of strategic projects that would have far greater impact on both the financial top and bottom lines. This kind of misalignment between where investments are made and corporate strategies is the result of poor portfolio prioritization and lack of accurate data on the strategic impact of products. Projects need to be funded based on their merit and continued alignment with corporate objectives — something that is only possible with the proper tools to support program management.

Lost Competitive Advantage and Market Share

In an intensely competitive business climate, the first to market is often able to set pricing that later competitors will have to follow. Organizations that cannot support the predictability necessary to sustain time-to-market will lose this critical competitive advantage. Driven by rapid advances in communication technology, many businesses today have extended their supply chains and business partners across the globe. This factor alone makes collaborative communication of and access to, real-time information a necessity to avoid cascading delays of tasks and projects. When product schedules are dependent on the execution of multiple interdependent projects by globally dispersed teams, everyone must 1) be working with the same updated information and 2) all project processes must adhere to a single enterprise-wide standard.

Inability to Leverage & Manage Global Resources

Operating in the prevailing global economy, companies developing products without taking advantage of global resources will be left behind by those that do. The more complex the product the more likely the design, test, and manufacture of its parts and components will be executed in Asia or Eastern Europe. Multisite environments in disparate geographic locations increase a company’s vulnerability to miscommunication and misunderstanding. Without common tools, processes, procedures and real-time two-way communication the global resource strategy for product development can cost a company more than it planned to save in re-work, inaccuracy, delays, and ultimately — customer satisfaction.

Impaired Forecasting Capabilities

In the absence of a clear view of the project docket and with different business units adhering to different budgeting processes, forecasting with any degree of accuracy is virtually impossible. Without a consistently enforced discipline for creating budgets at project ideation and reviewing budgets during project execution, companies chronically struggle to gain some level of predictability, much less accuracy. When budgets are rough estimates at best the likelihood of project cost overruns and uncontrolled risk approaches certainty.

Damaged Customer & Partner Relationships, Lost Credibility

In the end, a company’s success is determined by its ability to meet customer expectations for quality, cost and timing. When these customer expectations are missed repeatedly, the relationship is damaged due to lack of credibility.

When complete project scope is unclear due to the absence of formalized requirements and design processes, projected resource requirements and scheduling are often made without even the knowledge of the existence of dependencies. This situation leads to progressive discovery of project issues, schedule roadblocks, design workarounds, and inadequate resource assignments. Worse yet, quality is frequently compromised to meet promised completion dates due to unanticipated workload and misallocation of development resources. Not only is the customer disappointed with extended delivery dates, the end product functionality is impaired and typically costs have exceeded what was anticipated. The consequences of this scenario are dire and can easily lead to companies being excluded from new contract opportunities. The resulting damaged customer relationships could have been avoided with management access to a single, real-time view of project schedules, resources, interdependencies, and quality.

Repeating the Same Mistakes

Another consequence of dispersed data silos and processes is the inability to learn from past experience. Knowing what worked and what didn’t translates to considerable business value when projects are capitalized and prioritized with the advantage of hindsight. Simple access to past information and data can inform today’s decisions, leading to dramatically different outcomes. Without a single data repository that stores all of the history of a product within its lifecycle leveraging past knowledge is extremely difficult in product development. Exacerbated in industries with aging workforces of highly skilled knowledge workers, errors are often needlessly repeated while new issues fail to be documented. In an environment where data and processes silos are perpetrated, lack of process standardization is inevitable. Without process standardization it is impossible to know even what to look for much less where. The holy grail of incremental process improvement remains out of reach when there is no transfer of knowledge.

Is There Another Way?

When Program Management is embedded into a company’s PLM platform improvements are seen in cost reduction, reduced rework, minimized schedule delays, improved product quality, improved customer satisfaction, and increased resource productivity. In a common environment with a “single source of truth”each discipline’s processes, tools and information are shared across the enterprise. Programs are connected across the enterprise with every stage of the product lifecycle because Program Management becomes the backbone of the PLM environment (Figure 4).

By configuring product development environments where Program Management is an integral and synergistic component of PLM, enterprises can support the capture of essential “program intelligence” at every phase gate. In addition to the phase deliverables, a wealth of other supporting materials including decision rationales, alternative architectures and designs, simulations and analysis is brought forward with each deliverable. This transparency into past phase information encourages knowledge and data persistence across phases within a program, fueling re-use, and avoiding repeat mistakes.

This drives business value through increased speed, quality, and efficiency. Engineers and managers alike spend more time creating value and innovating, rather than looking for data and information. Embedding Program Management systems within the PLM platform ensures that the very latest information is exchanged between the disciplines. At the executive, program and project management levels, delays waiting for complete information can be reduced. Regardless of location and time zone, engineers and managers can all access the same information which greatly improves workflows between global resources. Just as importantly, embedding programs within PLM will also support the enforcement of common Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) so that processes, procedures and management protocols are the same within and across the enterprise. Ideally, the WBS for a product would begin at its concept stage (or at proposal contract stage for a contract developer), and persist throughout the product life cycle.

Companies across a wide range of industries are using Tallyfy to realize measurable improvements in efficiency, speed to market, strategic alignment, and cost control such as:

• Reduced cycle time, increased productivity, ability to define market pricing from faster time to market, competitive advantage.
• Better budget control and resource management, funding of the right products, improved financial and risk management.
• Improved resource planning for load-balancing and assignment of right skills to the right project.
• Greater ease of collaboration between partners and employees in disparate geographic locations for better cost control and faster time to market.
• Greater realized value from engineering staff that are freed from repetitive project administration, enabling more creativity and innovation.
• Better leverage of existing IP (re-use) and product knowledge, improved enterprisewide knowledge distribution.
• Ability to bid on more, larger, complex projects, win more repeat business.