Planning development processes for complex products

Efficient planning of design processes is of critical importance to meet tight deadlines and budgets; and the development of process planning tools is a lively research area. This paper describes current planning practice in industry and the challenges associated with it. In industry, a multitude of plans are used in parallel each focussing on a different aspect. The units of planning and their resulting plans roughly fall into product plans considering cost, bill of materials and procurement considerations; process plans including different milestone, lead-times, task and activity plans; and quality plans. Over the course of a project, the same plan can serve as a prescriptive plan defining steps in the process, a target plan against which process is measured, and a record of the process. This paper argues that organisations work because individuals use more than one plan and have a tacit understanding of the relationships between these plans. Variations between different companies are discussed before the paper concludes with a reflection on implication for planning support.