Process performance in product development: measures and impacts

Abstract

The key to successful project management is knowing how well the process is performing to prevent problems rather than fix them after they occur. Success measurement in product development has emphasized end‐result measures of overall project performance or economic value. The product development literature has largely ignored process performance (i.e., the measurement of how effectively the product development process is actually working). Process performance may be an early warning signal of downstream problems in a project's quality, time, or productivity. This paper proposes a model of process performance at the project level during product and process engineering. The model suggests that process performance mediates the influence of concurrent engineering (process choice) on overall project development performance. This process performance model is tested in the automobile industry using a sample of 406 product development projects in Germany and the USA. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.