Visual and interactive tool for product development process enhancement: Towards intuitive support of co-located project review

Abstract

Product life management refers to every method or tools which participate to the collaboration of actors involved along the product life. The main topic concerns the organization of this cycle by mastering the evolution between its various phases. Collaboration is a main bottleneck since every phase will involve different experts. The main issue in collaboration is to ensure a good understanding of requirements and constraints of collaborators and to manage conflicts between different experts. Negotiations are expected to solve potential conflicts. This is usually done in project review where the experts must converge towards a common solution. In this paper we investigate the efficiency of a tool formalizing and structuring the project review activity. This tool takes advantage of emerging technologies, here a multi-touch table. We illustrate the discussion with a use case concerning the development of personal computer housing. © 2012 International Federation for Information Processing.