Customer-focused development practices in Systems Engineering companies: A case study across industry sectors

Establishing deep understanding of customers and their perception of value is a prerequisite to deliver commercially successful products in today's hostile business environment. This paper elaborates on to which degree companies focus on customer value, along with their collaborative practices with customers undertaken in product development. Emphasis has been placed on comparing such practices in Systems Engineering (SE) companies with the ones in other industry sectors. We hypothesize that since SE companies are typically requirements-driven and operate in a B2B environment somewhat separated from end-user's real needs, this would imply that they are less focused on understanding and satisfying true customer value in their product development practices. A case study was designed to use two different methodologies for data collection. First, a literature review was conducted to establish an overview of theory and industry best-practices. The findings were synthesized, analyzed and decomposed into a set of twelve governing statements, which were implemented into a survey distributed to 50 companies. The outcome from the literature review was in parallel converted into a customer-focus capability maturity tool intended for in-depth, face-to-face assessments with nine companies. The results from the two data strategies were then triangularized and used to test our initial hypothesis. The results from both methods indicate that product engineering practices in SE companies have a more distant relation to customer value than in many other industries. This implies that there may be a potential for SE companies to define more integrated practices with direct interfaces towards customers to prevent missed value opportunities and hence improve innovation capability.