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Concurrent Crashing and Overlapping in Product Development

Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 30 Wadsworth Street, E53-387, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
Anderson School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095
troemer{at}mit.edu
rahmadi{at}anderson.ucla.edu

This research addresses two common tools for reducing product development lead times: overlapping of development stages and crashing of development times. For the first time in the product development literature, a formal model addresses both tools concurrently, thus facilitating analysis of the interdependencies between overlapping and crashing.

The results exhibit the necessity of addressing overlapping and crashing concurrently, and exhibit general characteristics of optimal overlapping/crashing policies. The impact of different evolution/sensitivity constellations on optimal policies is investigated, and comprehensive guidelines for structuring development processes are provided.

For the special case of linear costs, an efficient procedure is presented that generates the efficient time-cost trade-off curves and determines the corresponding optimal overlapping/crashing policies. The impact of key parameters and the robustness regarding their estimates is illustrated with a simple two-stage example.

Subject classifications: product development processes; overlapping; crashing; development leadtimes; development costs.
History: Received June 2001; revision received May 2002; accepted August 2003.