Competitive pressures are forcing companies to work faster and with
fewer resources. As companies streamline their operations,
difficulties in managing the details of strategic business processes
become critical limits to increased performance and cost savings.
Design processes are particularly difficult to manage due to their
inherent dynamics. I will present a management approach in which
process managers and participants partner with a live-representation
decision-support system that is coordinating, scheduling, and
executing design processes. All process activities are integrated
with the system, which maintains the latest information about process
status and downstream expectations. Managers directly manipulate the
live representation to change process structure and execution
details. These changes are immediately propagated throughout the
organization, keeping everyone in sync with the most up-to-date
process view.
In this talk, I will describe the philosophical and technical
issues associated with the live-representation approach. I will close
with some experiences of automotive and aerospace manufacturers using
the approach.
