Managing product development projects: On the significance of fountains and deadlines

Product development in high-technology industries is often carried out in p rojects. Managing such projects is a matter of both promoting creative know ledge generation processes and controlling progress towards global goals an d time limits. From such a dual perspective, we discuss the meaning and sui tability of organizing product development projects in a concurrent rather than a sequential fashion and the use of deadlines as control mechanisms. The empirical case is about the breakthrough in Japan for the Swedish compa ny Ericsson, The system was to be fully operative in 1994. This project for ced management to reconsider their traditional way of working with projects and to try a new one instead - labelled the 'fountain model' - which relie d more on concurrent work and inter-functional cooperation. As a result, th ey managed to shorten development time quite considerably and deliver the s ystem on time. The fountain model of project organization is interpreted as expressing a ' coupling logic' suitable for error detection in a systemic complexity conte xt. We also suggest a model, identifying four different project organizatio n logics, that may be used contingent upon the type of error problematic an d complexity involved. Using the garbage-can metaphor, we also discuss how deadlines and other time-based controls may support the fountain model by p romoting inter-functional responsiveness and 'global' reflection.