Engineering activities — considering value creation from a holistic perspective

Modern value creation is characterized by collaboration of large networks of specialized companies. Due to market requirements and increasing competition, concurrent or simultaneous engineering has become the standard procedure in product development. Still, product development processes often follow the traditionally linear and sequential patterns, allowing for only a narrow scope of iterations. Milestone-driven models are widely used to control and steer such processes. In this article, the authors argue that proper understanding of knowledge flows in development project is an essential aspect to be regarded in design and organization of product development processes. Therefore, a new approach is proposed in this paper which considers the product development process as a set of Engineering Activities. Such activities can be seen as instantiations of processes and are the core of any value creation processes. During an experiment a group of students carried out a simple product development project within a controlled environment. The resulting model was then re-evaluated using survey results from a further student experiment. Both results indicate that the activity model can be applied to describe development projects and that it can be used to identify knowledge flows and barriers within development teams.