A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

How to plan for better product development collaboration in 2016

How to plan for better product development collaboration in 2016
Oleg
Oleg
11 May, 2016 | 2 min for reading

collaboration-team

Collaboration was an important element in the development of product lifecycle technologies. First PDM and PLM systems allowed to control data access, share information and communicate between team members. Back those days, processes in manufacturing organizations were managed using emails and paper trays. So, PDM / PLM collaboration was quite innovative idea.

For the last decade, our business environment has changed significantly. It directly affects the ways we  manage processes and interact in product development and manufacturing organizations. We can see many new tools and technologies around us. But the paradox is that the more tools we have, more complex the environment and collaboration. How to improve communication between people? How to simplify collaboration?

I found a confirmation to that in the last slide deck – Collaboration Trends and Strategy Approaches for 2016 by Dion Hinchcliffe, Chief Strategy Officer at 7Summits. He speaks about mobile, cognitive supported collaboration, remote presence, community management, wearables, digital workspace and few other trends.

The following slide is basically a confirmation to what I see in many organizations. There are so many tools that helping people to collaborate. But it makes us even more disconnected.

collaboration paradox

I was digging into Dion’s slides trying to find something that can give me an idea how engineers can improve collaboration in product development. I found the following slide demonstrating the idea of multi-layered collaboration strategy.

multi-layer-collaboration-strategy

One of the problems I’ve seen in the companies for many years is related to tool proliferation. The change is hard for people, so they keep using existing tools. Also, many manufacturing companies are conservative in the adoption of new tools, products and tech. On the other side, larger organizations are complex and even harder to change. This is a situation where application of John Gal’s law can help to create a more efficient collaborative environment for large company.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall

What is my conclusion? Team collaboration improvement is an important step in the process of introduction of new tools to product development organization. Team is the most connected group of people. In product development it can be cross functional multi-disciplinary team of engineers working on a specific product or technology. By improving team collaboration we can build a foundation to optimize product development in modern digital age. Just my thought…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
10 November, 2014

Engineering.com article by Verdi Ogewell earlier today is introducing a next step of PLM vs. ERP battle for ownership of...

14 May, 2012

Normally, I’m trying to avoid the topic of PLM competition. Not very often, readers or attendees at conference are approaching...

21 May, 2019

It is a time to come back to Open Source software discussion. Open source was not the hottest buzzword for...

11 June, 2022

The last three years were one of the most turbulent in the history of PLM. COVID, supply chain challenges and...

20 October, 2016

  Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You probably heard the phrase usually attributed to Peter Druker. Did Peter Druker really said this?...

8 February, 2017

Timing is one of the most interesting and important elements success or failure of any projects. Right technology in a...

19 September, 2014

It has been already few years since I started to discuss cloud PLM opportunities on my blog. I found one...

25 September, 2021

The discussions around open source were around for more than a decade. You can check out my articles about PLM...

20 August, 2012

Despite hot weather and summer vacation time, I can see quite many cloud discussions trending around. I was following OSCON...

Blogroll

To the top