The movements like the digital creative industries, co-creation, 3D printing, new prototyping and radical innovation oriented capabilities require and allow new product development strategies, combining simplicity, velocity and flexibility as never seeing before.
The agility strategy is the idea of conciliation between the robustness, reliability and quality provided by disciplined business processes (from product and or technology) with new techniques and practices oriented for velocity, urgency and continuous change requirements.
The idea is combine them in order to face the new and turbulent competition environments. Cooper (2008), recently, emphasized the importance of exploring different approaches, including practices from the so-called “agile methods”, in order to cope with the innovation and dynamism of certain industries and project types. The author also pointed out the need to adapt stage-gate models to achieve higher levels of flexibility and “agility”.
Agile Project Management (APM) methods have been widely disseminated in the software development industry. These methods gained their momentum since a group of practitioners from the software development field (Beck et al., 2001) conceived a manifesto (Manifesto for Agile Software Development). We are investigating these methods and adapting them for product development on manufacturing industry and for technology management areas as Technology Roadmapping.
Our researches investigate questions such as the concept and how measure agility (Conforto et al.,2016); the product vision concept applied on agility (Benassi et al. 2016); practices, tools and techniques for agility on product development and technology management (Conforto et al, 2015); hybrid models merging discipline and agility (Conforto and Amaral, 2016); and organizationa practices for agility as improvisation (Confort, Rebentisch and Amaral, 2016).
Ongoing projects:
- Evaluation of agility: strategies for agile and plan-driven integration plans on product development and technology management
- Improvisation and the organizational side of agile innovation
- Product vision management
Researchers:
- Carolina Reigado
- Daniel Capaldo Amaral
- Edivandro Carlos Conforto
- Michael Bianchi
- Raphael Prateleira
- Sérgio Luis da Silva
Referências
Carlos, R. ; RODRIGUES, K. F. C. ; OLIVEIRA, M. G. ; AMARAL, D. C. ; ROZENFELD, Henrique . Managing roadmapping through principles and practices of agile project management.. In: International Conference on Management of Technology (IAMOT), 2013, Porto Alegre. IAMOT2013 Proceedings, 2013
Carvalho, F.H.T. ; COSTA, J. M. H. C. ; Daniel C. Amaral . Envisioning products to support the agile manegement of innovative design. In: International conference in engineering design, 2015, Milão. International conference on engineering design. Inglaterra: Elsevier, 2015. v. 1. p. 1-9.
Conforto, E.C., Amaral, D.C., 2010. Evaluating an agile method for planning and controlling innovative projects. Project Management Journal 41 (2), 73-80.
Cooper, R.G., 2008. Perspective: The stage-gate idea-to-launch process – update, what’s new, and NexGen systems. Journal of Product Innovation Management 25 (3), 213-232.