linking up

Successfully combining project and product management spells marketability.

By Jean Thilmany, Supplement Editor

There are two phrases engineering managers become familiar with fast: product management and project management. Understanding the guts of those concepts and implementing them well make for the difference between a successful product launch or a flop on the scale of New Coke, said Steve Fahrenkrog, standards program manager at the Project Management Institute in Newtown Square, Pa. The professional association certifies and trains project managers and is a standards-setting body for the practice of project management.

Why are project management and product management so vital to engineering?

Mainly because engineered products aren't created by one person. People and departments band together to carry out the complex process of coming up with an idea for a new product, making sure it's viable in the marketplace, and then getting the product out the door.

Each Part Makes a Whole

Engineers are often immersed in detail work. They work intently with their heads down. It's easy, under those circumstances, to forget that they're part of a team working to make a complete product, Fahrenkrog said.

Individual engineers working apart can be compared to the blind men who touch an elephant. "Ah, an elephant is a long trunk," one calls out. "No, an elephant is a stout leg," says another. Successful teamwork needs someone—a manager—to step back and consider the whole for what it is, to make sure individual parts and processes fit together.

Fahrenkrog uses his own background to describe the importance of project management. Before joining the institute, he served in the U.S. Navy, charged with engineering the H-3 Sea King military helicopter.

"I coordinated the various engineers in doing this or that, but it soon became apparent that what we were trying to do was part of a bigger thing," he said.

"Let's say we had a problem with the engine," he said. "We could get some mechanical engineers and some propulsion engineers together and figure out the problem. We could figure out what needed to be fixed and work to design that fix."

You aren't designing a part; you're helping an aircraft fly better.

But simply designing a new part to help the engine run better wasn't enough. Fahrenkrog's group needed to call on manufacturing engineers to make the part. Someone had to train mechanics to install it.

"And so, engineering the part was a piece of this bigger thing called project management," Fahrenkrog said. "We wanted to fix the aircraft so it would be more reliable."

According to Fahrenkrog, that's the key to project management. The engineers on his team weren't simply designing an engine part, they were ensuring the reliability of a military aircraft.

"Having some understanding of the concepts of project management and how the engineered piece fit within the bigger project became useful to me, and helped the engineers do a better job," he said.

Project management is often quite intuitive for engineers. For instance, when designing a gear, they break the design into various steps and estimate how long it will take to carry out each step.

On a broader scale, project managers also estimate the time and cost of each step of a project, to balance product and labor costs within the scope of the project. Engineers know how much their customer or corporation is willing to pay for a part and know how long they have to design it. They work backward from that information. That is, they consider cost and delivery time when they choose material and determine the intricacy of a part. Product and project management are tied in this way.

Managers make sure projects are carried out within an agreed-upon budget and time. A project manager's role comes down to balancing a project's scope, its cost, and its schedule, Fahrenkrog said.

A New Course of Study

Though many engineers learn project management as they go, they'll probably need formal training to refine skills as they move up the job ladder, Fahrenkrog said.

Say an engineer's first job after graduating from college is to help design a gear. He does well, advances, and next designs a group of gears. He then leads a team of several engineers who design a complete transmission. That team might include the electrical engineers and fluid analysts who also work on the transmission assembly.

"He's crossing the boundary from being a mechanical engineer to an expert who focuses on design, to a manager who oversees several engineers," Fahrenkrog said.

Once charged with managing people and complex projects, engineers can do their jobs better if they formally study the fundamentals of project management, he added.

"Some people have innate skills at figuring out project timelines, but you can develop those skills even further with the proper training," he said.

The phrase "project management" emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when companies started paying more attention to the size, scope, and duration of the projects they undertook to get a product to market. The Project Management Institute, founded in 1969, helped formalize the profession and train managers, Fahrenkrog said.

Today, the institute, which boasts 125,000 members, offers seminars and online training classes for project managers from many different fields, including engineering, automobile manufacturing, business management, and construction. It also publishes the project management standard, "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge." The institute certifies project managers; a professional development program enables certified project managers to maintain their credentials.

Above all, a project manager needs to be organized. The institute teaches managers how to hone their organizational skills within the framework of a project. Project management comprises five steps: initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the project, Fahrenkrog said. Within each step, managers need to know how to predict and plan for issues like the size and duration of the project.

Some mechanical engineers might eventually step out of their engineering roles and decide they like overseeing sophisticated engineering projects so much that they become certified project managers. Companies regularly employ project managers who devote themselves to a particular project and manage it to completion—which could take weeks, months, or years, depending on the project's scope. The manager then starts again at that company on a new project.

Fahrenkrog got a taste of project management in the Navy and decided he'd like to devote himself to that field full-time.

"I started in the engineering world and eventually had a foot in both camps," he said. "I saw more opportunity in project management and went with that full-time.

"But my engineering background always stood me in good stead because I was working on Department of Defense projects," he added. "I needed the engineering sophistication to make the projects work, but because of their complexity, I needed my project management sophistication as well."

Before the project comes the product. A project often is organized in order to efficiently make a product. A group of people need to conceive of a product before they can decide how it will be made, how much it will cost, and when it needs to be made.

Product management is a separate process, integral to business and equally important as project management, said Robert Cooper, president of the Product Development Institute of Ancaster, Ontario. He also is professor of industrial marketing and technology management at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

The institute researches best practices and helps companies refine their approaches to product development.

A primary part of product development is simply coming up with an idea for a new or innovative product, Cooper said.

"It's very hard for slower-growing businesses to come up with ideas," Cooper said. "These businesses have been around 50 years. One company I know of makes industrial pumps. How do you come up with a new product for an industrial pump?"

His institute champions the stage-gate process. The method breaks up the product development process into five stages. The stages can run concurrently, to get products to market quickly in today's competitive environment.

At the first stage, a business team checks out a potential product's market, its competition, and determines the product's merits. This is called the scoping stage.

During the second stage, the team builds the business case for the product. That is, team members justify the product's cost and define the product exactly.

In the development stage, managers plan how the product will be manufactured and marketed, and marketers get to work.

The product is tested and validated during the fourth stage. Engineers are distinctly familiar with that process.

At the final or fifth stage, the product is launched. That means the manufacturing line starts up full production and the marketing department introduces the great new product to potential buyers.

Opening the Gate

During each stage there is what Cooper calls a gate, or a decision point. This is where project managers, engineers, and other members of the team report in on their work. Mediocre products are culled at these points by mutual decision and good products get the go-ahead to proceed. The gates keep a company from wasting precious time and resources developing a product for which there is little promise of demand or whose costs cannot be kept in line.

"Product development is sort of a team sport," Cooper said. "In some companies, it was taking so long to make a product because they had no playbook to follow. The average engineer needs a roadmap to follow to make products happen."

Someone with a technical background is well trained to carry out a job once there's an exact definition of what that job is. Cooper's stage-gate process is essentially a roadmap—a series of steps to follow that help clarify product development.

The project manager, who leads a team of five to 15 people from different departments, is analogous to the team captain, Cooper said. The gates of the stage-gate process are also the points at which team members meet with management so everyone stays in the loop.

Tying project and product management isn't difficult, Cooper said. Nor is understanding the two concepts and implementing them on the job.

The practice changes with the times, Fahrenkrog said, but it's here to stay. And he expects project management to evolve just as businesses do.

Today's business environment calls upon companies to continually reinvent their offerings and get them quickly into the marketplace. As marketers, engineers, and managers work at breakneck speed on new ideas, they need a roadmap to follow or they risk losing focus or, worse, money. Since its inception in the 1950s, project management has given businesses that are open to the concept a way of getting new innovative products out the door.



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