Project Management in Product Development

Project Management in Product Development: Leadership Skills and Management Techniques to Deliver Great Products is written for new and aspiring project managers in product development. Although texts on project management are common, the material presented here is unique, instead focusing on product development, a challenging segment of project management because of the high level of uncertainty, the need for a robust set of problem-solving techniques, and a demand for broad cross-functional teams. The book also focuses on more than just project management techniques, including a thorough treatment of transformational and transactional leadership. Other topics covered include problem-solving techniques, development, and continuous improvement of processes required in product development, risk recognition and management, and proper communication with mangers and other stakeholders. Finally, project management techniques used in product development are presented, including the critical path method, scrum and XP, and Kanban/lean project development, along with the strengths and weaknesses of each. - Provides ways to successfully manage product development projects by teaching traditional and advanced project management techniques like Gantt, CPM, Agile, Lean, and others - Covers transformational and transactional leadership, how to create a vision and engage the team, as well as tactics on how to manage a complex set of tasks - Uses a practical, common sense approach to the day-to-day activities of a project manager, including project planning, project process development, problem-solving, project portfolio management, reporting, and more - Presents a thorough comparison of popular project management tools - Includes many examples, cases, and side-bars that are included throughout the book

George Ellis has worked in product development for 35 years. He first experienced the concept of continuous improvement two decades ago through the Danaher Corporation, one of the world's foremost lean thinking companies. Danaher transformed itself in the 1980s, modeling its Danaher Business System (DBS) on the Toyota Production System. Ellis has had numerous leadership roles at Danaher, including Vice President of Global Engineering for X-Rite from 2015 to 2018. In 2019, Ellis joined Envista Holdings Corporation, a new spin-off from Danaher for the dental industry, as Vice President of Innovation. There he spends every day immersed in lean knowledge work, deploying, improving, and sustaining new product development workflows in EBS, Envista's brand of lean knowledge. He also wrote Project Management for Product Development, Control System Design Guide (4th edition), and Observers in Control Systems, all from Elsevier.