PLM Library · Paper
Management Levers for Product Platforms
- Author
- Bruce G. Cameron, Edward F. Crawley, Jakub Kwapisz, Alicia McNeill
- Publisher
- Engineering Management Journal
- Year
- 2017
Summary
Uses 12 industrial case studies to investigate technical, financial and organizational mechanisms for maintaining commonality across product platforms. It examines the control and incentive levers available to platform managers when individual projects seek customization or optimization that would increase divergence.
The paper connects product-platform design with organizational behavior: reuse must be sustained through governance, incentives and management choices, not only through a shared technical architecture.
Our verdict
Recommended for platform governance and organizational change management. Particularly relevant when individual programs keep departing from a shared platform and engineering teams need practical ways to sustain reuse.
Who should read it
- —Platform managers and engineering leaders
- —OCM practitioners supporting cross-project reuse
- —PLM and configuration-management teams designing governance
How it relates to your work
- —Consider technical, financial and organizational levers together when governing shared components.
- —Use the case-study perspective to examine why project-level incentives undermine enterprise-wide reuse.
Keep in mind
- —Published in Engineering Management Journal, volume 29, issue 3, pages 128–139.
- —MIT provides the free authors' final manuscript; its pagination differs from the published paper.
- —The case studies inform management judgment rather than supplying a universal platform-governance formula.