Principles and Tools for Practical Agile Project Management in Product Development Activities

In practical project management terms, ”Agile” as a methodology applied in the software product domain has not proliferated in the hardware product domain as readily and effectively as it has in the software product development domain.  As it turns out Agile on its own is not sufficient for the tasks required in the hardware development domain. Managing the change of product iterations as a typical hardware product goes through the development process has demonstrated itself to be almost impervious to achieving high return on the human and technical assets that deliver that “good enough” solution to the marketplace, in a nutshell it is a time to money question that needs to be addressed. 

This presentation will provide the reasoning behind the underlying issues that beleaguer companies and project managers and provide an outline, methods, tools and principles for implementing and practically applying an “Agile” product development approach to managing the deliverables and the time it takes to go through the NPD (New Product Development) process.  We will cover the planning, execution, and measuring (in the form of monitoring and controlling) that fosters stakeholder communication, tracking time and schedules, helping to manage the critical resource of humans doing the NPD work delivering a product or technology to market.