Structuring highly iterative product development projects by Using HIP-indicators

Nowadays, manufacturing companies are faced with the challenge of meeting heterogeneous customer requirements in short product life cycles with a variety of product functions. So far, some of the functional requirements remain unknown until late stages of the product development. This is mainly caused by an increasing market dynamic in combination with the continuously changing customer expectations. A way to handle these uncertainties is the highly iterative product development (HIP) approach. By structuring the development project as a highly iterative process, this method provides customer oriented and marketable products. Therefore, it is necessary to structure each development into empiric-adaptive or deterministic-normative scopes. Recently first approaches for the combination of deterministic-normative methods like Stage-Gate and empirical-adaptive methods like SCRUM on a project management basis have emerged. Accordingly, this paper aims at the presentation of a methodology which enables the classification of each development scope by using a HIP-Indicator. This indicator reveals optimum suitability of every development scope for the realization with either empiric-adaptive or deterministic-normative approaches.