Abstract

Organizations invest substantial resources to implement generic product development (PD) processes as a means to manage the development of high-complexity products. The difficulties reported on recent aircraft development programs suggest that manufacturers may not be fully benefiting from these tools. There is an opportunity for organizations developing complex products to learn from completed programs as a means to make informed improvements in their generic PD processes. Existing research supports that learning from projects in this way is mostly unsuccessful in industry. The lack of sophisticated project learning techniques capable of managing the complexity inherent to complex programs is a limiting factor to realizing this opportunity.

The purpose of this research project was to study an archived development program in order to extract useful information pertaining to the host organization’s PD process. A case study of an aircraft development program was undertaken to gain insight into the root causes of the program’s considerable schedule overrun. This included developing an approach for untangling the program’s non-intuitive behaviour and identifying the fundamental successes and failures of its execution. A mixed-methods research design incorporating quantitative and qualitative methods was developed and implemented. Additionally, an adapted thematic analysis (TA) method augmented with elements of qualitative content analysis (QCA), thematic networks (TNs), and causal maps was formulated for this investigation.

The results of the case study included a tiered catalogue of root causes driving the program’s outcome and a map of their causal linkages. These themes are uncovered lessons pertaining to the host organizations PD process and the fundamental successes and failures of its actual execution. These results are of value to the host organization and empower it to make informed improvements in its processes. They are also insightful for any organization undertaking complex PD. The overarching result of this study is ultimately the research design itself as an effective mechanism for systematically identifying the root causes of a complex development program’s outcome and untangling their interactions. This result is an explicit contribution to the need for more sophisticated organizational project learning mechanisms specifically applicable to complex programs. Moreover, it is an enabler to developing a full-fledged process for making closed-loop improvements to PD processes as a means to achieve their ongoing improvement.