Operation Suppy Chain & Management

David Imboden, Livia Artuso, Clariss Chow, Youssef Hautier,

Topic: Are Agile development / Scrum approaches applicable to other product domain than the software development?
1. Introduction
The development of a new product is key for a company. The products can be very simple (a new fork in the Ikea assortment) to extremely complex (let’s think about a new airplane for Airbus), their development still requires a multidisciplinary approach, implies a lot of risks, a lot of uncertainties and usually involves a large amount of resources and cash.
But what is exactly product development? We define it as the set of processes that will bring a concept or an idea to product that is used by the final customer, in volume. Other definitions can be found in the literature. We should note that Product Development can be applied to very different domain. Physical (or hardware) products (like the two examples stated above) are the first to come to mind. This category also encompasses products like a new molecule in the biotech industry or a new aliment for the pet-food industry.
Millions of new products are launched every year. The time to market, the quality, the fit with the customer need, the integration with the other parts of the company (Customer Service, Manufacturing) are all critical to the success of this new product. It is no surprise that both the academic and industry world committed to develop better processes to handle Product Development.
Until the mid-eighties, the usual development paradigm was the phase gate concept (or cascade approach). This approach implied -very logically- that all the steps the development must be known at the beginning of the project and that a phase should have been completed before moving to the next. In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka exposed in a seminal paper (The New New