Strategic product development
In this case we use Multi Project Planner to layout the product development plan for a small software company.
The product portfolio consist of three products, P1, P2 and P3.
The products share common technologies, but also have issues of their own.
The resources are organized in product teams, as preserving the domain knowledge is mandatory in order to sustain product coherence.
Any software product is based on several external defined platforms, the evolution of which the company is forced to keep up with. Further new technologies open new opportunities, which will be demanded by the customers.
The economically most optional strategy to cope with this situation is to adapt one product at a time transferring the gained knowledge to the next product in a 'baton race' kind of way.
Transferring a technology from one team to another while the reasoning is still fresh in the heads of the developers is essential, as the code itself seldom contains the reasoning.
Further transferring as soon as the basic knowledge has been gained will result in a more generic solution as the adaptation of the technology faces different requirements.
This leads to a continual state of Technological Transfer.
In the schedule below this situation is depicted.
The row represents products and technologies which are to be applied to all products are formulated as projects with colors in the blue range whiles projects, which are specific to a single product have colors in the range red to orange.
Technological transfer among products is accomplished by first gaining the experience by applying the technology to one product and then use this experience when applying the technology to another product.
The first activity is likely to have a longer duration than the succeeding activities, as experience has to be gained.
The planning problem is to secure the transferals with the available staff and in such a way, that the organization will produce a continual stream of innovations.
This leads to a baton race kind of scheduling, where there is some overlapping among applying the technology to the products.