#15 Development process navigation

Navigation is one of the most useful activities when interacting with the surrounding. For example, GPS satellites have revolutionized how you drive and find your destination. Dictionaries and grammar have, for hundreds of years, helped you how to navigate in written language. And telescopes and microscopes have navigated humans to be localized between the incredibly large and the vanishingly small.

Navigation is also useful when planning and predicting human activities. Cpdm (Complex product development model) is, in fact, a kind of map, efficiently navigating you from a product idea to a prototype to be manufactured. The next question is – how to describe and explain such a type of navigation.

At this point, there is a stubborn obstacle. If we compare driving a long road with a car, every meter must be traveled one after the other. There is no way to slice the ride, for example, to drive the middle first, then the end, and then finalize with the beginning. Or to arrive faster, by use of a dozen of cars.

When developing a sizeable product, you must find a way to engage many engineers in parallel and navigate all these by a map. To resemble product development by a car ride, leads to a map often called a “Water Fall” map. You must always completely end one distance before you may start next.

However, there is a way to cope with this obstacle. First, we assume, not all documentation should be developed strictly in series. And maybe we can also agree on, that all documentation should neither be developed in full parallel. So there seems to be a compromise: develop all documentation in a logic series, but don’t wait until the former part is fully complete until you start the latter one.

So now we can describe the logical development documentation flow, but we hand it over to the engineers to decide when they have enough information to start developing the next documentation. It should be said that this is not as easy as it seems. If an engineer starts documentation too early, many facts are still missing, many guesses must be made, and many reworks will be inescapable. And the reverse, if the engineer waits too long to start documentation after the previous activity, the product development will be unnecessarily delayed.

The below wall chart (the process map) has too low a resolution, but you can realize the overall structure like a globe. If you click on the download arrow or the download button below, a high-resolution pdf will be downloaded, with all details visible. The pdf wall chart also fits to be printed on two landscape A4 or A3 papers, which can easily be taped together.

Detailed Cpdm Process Map

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