Using Boundary Management for More Effective Product Development

Abstract

Twenty years ago, most companies developed their own products in a single location and brought them to market themselves. Today, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are enlisting partners on a global scale as subsystem designers and producers in order to create and deliver new products into the market more rapidly and more frequently. This is especially true for large, complex products from the aerospace, telecommunications, electronics, and software industries. To assure the delivery of information across organizational boundaries, new coordination mechanisms need to be adopted (boundary management). In this article, best practices are described on how OEMs and partners selforganize and use agile, cooperative techniques to maintain daily communication among numerous internal and partner engineers to better coordinate product design and system integration. This article focuses on examples from the aerospace industry; however; these tactics can be applied in any organization to innovate at faster rates, to make delivery times more predictable, and to realize shorter product development timelines.