Agile for Hardware Product Development

Jason is a Project Management Professional with over 15 years experience leading product and technology development projects with global cross-functional teams.

  Agile   Estimating   Manufacturing  

Many articles have been written about the growing use of the agile methods of Scrum and Kanban in product development projects; however, most of these are focused on software or IT projects. Agile methods can also be used very effectively for hardware development projects, yielding many of the same benefits.

In addition to new product development (NPD), many teams are also responsible for continuation engineering (CE) on existing products, which can include such activities as releasing new product variants to production, addressing quality issues or reducing cost on existing products.

Depending on the specific industry, technology or products being developed, there may be some adjustment required to the standard agile approaches; however, the very nature of agile allows for modification to suit the needs of the team. Our team’s experience has shown that a combination of Scrum and Kanban (often referred to as Scrumban) has been an effective approach to managing our work for both NPD and CE activities.

I lead a cross-functional team of six full-time electrical and mechanical engineers, and approximately 10 members from other departments that contribute on a part-time basis from disciplines that include software, marketing, manufacturing, supply chain, quality, regulatory and testing. We work in the power electronics industry designing and developing products in …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.