Agile product development for software, hardware, and mechanical collaboration should accelerate the process – if everyone uses it.
As the demand for “smart” products (e.g., smartphones, smart cars, and even smart appliances) grows, product manufacturers face a daunting challenge – how to accelerate the design and development of these complex products. With increasing levels of embedded software, “connectedness”, and complex mechanical/electrical/electronic sub-systems, these products come with a unique set of challenges for manufacturers to:
- integrate and align mechanical product development alongside hardware and software development
- respond to and more readily deliver customer-requested product and whole-offering enhancements
- more effectively support collaborative, multi-disciplinary decision-making.
To address these kinds of challenges, PTC recently introduced AgileWorx , an Agile-based tool designed to support product engineering teams engaged in complex product development. AgileWorx provides a central hub where engineering teams can – according to PTC, “visualize work in progress, prioritize activities, identify dependencies, and remove impediments.”
While Agile practices have been applied successfully for more than a decade in software development, many organizations struggle to apply Agile principles in product engineering. Critics argue that physical product development and software development have little in common – the former demands a highly structured environment and a clear definition of requirements “up-front”, while the latter is a characterized by a need for flexibility and constant updating. Yet more and more, product development is anything but “well-defined.” Increasingly, product requirements are not static – products are constantly being improved or modified via software updates, or changing form based on customer-driven enhancements.
This is where an Agile development environment can provide some key advantages. By definition, it is a methodology that enables a team to direct and frequently redirect its collective efforts as needed on a project. It offers flexibility – and accountability – but makes everyone a stakeholder in the effort. It invites customer input throughout the process, and prioritizes change requests based on customer feedback, not a set of potentially out-of-date product specs. In essence, an Agile methodology provides a collaborative development environment whose mission is to accelerate the development process in the wake of an ever-changing, ever-evolving set of requirements.
In the case of AgileWorx, such a secure, cloud-based, Agile collaborative environment comes at a price of $700/user/year, making it accessible to engineering teams both inside and outside of large organizations. It is not being sold as an “enterprise-wide” tool, yet may find itself growing into one as it gains traction among those organizations seeking to support complex product development and integrate their ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), and CAD (Computer-Aided Design) teams. Interestingly, although both IBM and Rally offer enterprise-level Agile tools to support this type of collaborative product development, and cloud-based Agile tools are available from companies such as SCRUMwise, this is the first such tool from one of the major PLM providers.
The real challenge? Getting engineering teams to adapt to and adopt these new Agile methodologies – especially if it means learning a new tool that can get in the way of “getting the job done.” In that regard, the jury is still out on AgileWorx – after all, it’s still quite new, and as such, still unproven. But out of the starting gate – it looks promising.
Amy Rowell, Senior Analyst, Project Manager and PLM maven
Amy Rowell, a project manager with Iyno Advisors, focuses on the engineering software sector with a passion for innovation and sustainability in next-gen product design and development.