MULTIPROJECT STRATEGY, DESIGN TRANSFER, AND PROJECT PERFORMANCE - A SURVEY OF AUTOMOBILE DEVELOPMENT-PROJECTS IN THE US AND JAPAN

Large manufacturers usually need to manage multiple projects in order to leverage their financial and engineering resource investments on ne w technologies and designs, The purpose of this paper is to explore th e relationship between different multiproject strategies and project p erformance measured by lend time and engineering hours, The multiproje ct strategy in this study focuses on different ways of transferring co re technologies and designs from one project to another within the fir m, First, this paper proposes a typology of different multiproject str ategies, which categorizes new product development projects into four types: new design, rapid design transfer, sequential design transfer, and design modification. Second, using our survey results on 103 diffe rent new product projects at 10 automobile firms in Japan and the US, this study concludes that projects using the rapid design transfer str ategy are the most efficient in terms of engineering hours, Only throu gh rapid design transfer can a preceding design be transferred from a base project to a new project with effective task sharing among engine ers and mutual adjustments between the two projects. This paper also d iscusses organizational requirements for managing rapid design transfe r projects, Neither a pure project-team approach nor a functional appr oach seem appropriate for the management of concurrent multiple projec ts.