P²aE – Adaption of agile development approaches for physical product development

全球化的市场，较短的技术和产品生命周期导致产品开发项目的不确定性和波动性。如果项目团队没有考虑到这些，预算超支和截止日期变更将不可避免。当涉及到复杂的技术系统时，这些影响尤其会加剧，因为基于它们的复杂性和固有依赖关系的数量，即使是专家也很难忽视它们。当一个组件发生变化时（例如，关于系统行为的新见解需要修改设计假设），它将对最初看起来无关紧要的组件产生深远的影响。传统的项目管理倾向于在项目开始时预测不确定性和波动性。这就是项目团队深入分析市场需求和技术可行性的原因。项目计划最终体现了这一阶段的结果，并表明当每个项目团队成员都坚持计划时，项目就会成功。然而，在不确定和不稳定的发展情况下，这是一个重大的误解，因为未来的变化不是通过启发式或预测方法完全可以预测的，更不用说可以避免或对冲。敏捷开发源于软件开发并逐渐扩散到其他领域，它基于一种不同的范式：一方面，变化被认为是不可预测的，另一方面，变化本身不会损害项目。相反，他们可以开辟新的选择和机会，以确保竞争优势。通过在高度频繁的周期（1 - 4周）中设计客户可触摸和体验的原型，开发团队通过客户反馈不断了解产品的哪些方面需要改进，以吸引客户，经济上可行，技术上可行。由于物理的限制（例如，构建原型的成本和时间），将敏捷方法应用到物理产品开发中并不是微不足道的。这就是为什么项目目标是调查敏捷方法如何适用于物理产品开发（非软件行业），需要哪些调整，以及哪种类型的原型（纸上原型、实验室设置等）适合敏捷物理产品开发。为此，该项目遵循扎根理论研究方法，并使用领先用户方法，通过案例研究从敏捷方法的领先用户那里识别和学习。

Globalized markets, short technology and product life cycles cause uncertainty and volatility in product development projects. If the project team does not consider those, budget overruns and deadline shifts will be inevitable in general. These effects intensify especially when it comes to complex technical systems because based on their complexity and number of inherent dependencies they are even for experts hard to overlook. As one component changes (e.g. new insights concerning the system’s behavior requires revisions of design assumptions), it will create far-ranging consequences on components that seemed irrelevant at first. Conventional project management tends to predict uncertainty and volatility at the project beginning. This is why the project team profoundly analyses i.a. the market needs and the technical feasibility. The project plan finally manifests the results of this phase and suggests that the project can be successful when every project team member sticks to the plan. This, however, is a momentous misinterpretation in uncertain and volatile development contexts since future changes are not entirely predictable by heuristics or forecasting methods, not to mention avoidable or hedge-able. Agile developing, which stems from software development and diffuses gradually to other domains, bases upon a different paradigm: On the one hand, changes are considered unpredictable and, on the other hand, do not per se harm the project. In contrast, they can open up new options and opportunities to secure a competitive advantage. By designing prototypes in highly frequent cycles (1 – 4 weeks) that are tangible and experience-able for the customer, the development team learns continuously through the customer feedback which product aspects should be improved in order to be attractive to the customer, economically viable and technically feasible. Caused by the constraints of physicality (e.g. costs and time effort to build prototypes) the adaption of agile approaches to physical product development is not trivial. That is why the project goal is the investigation of how the agile approach is applicable in physical product development (non-software industries), which adaptions are required and which kinds of prototypes (paper prototypes, laboratory set-up etc.) are appropriate for agile physical product development. For that purpose, the project follows the grounded theory research approach and uses the lead user method to identify and learn via case studies from users of agile methods being ahead of the bulk.