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Understanding fire fighting in new product development ⋆
Author(s) -
Repenning Nelson P.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of product innovation management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.646
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1540-5885
pISSN - 0737-6782
DOI - 10.1111/1540-5885.1850285
Subject(s) - phenomenon , product (mathematics) , new product development , firefighting , portfolio , risk analysis (engineering) , business , principal (computer security) , computer science , operations management , process management , marketing , economics , computer security , geography , finance , physics , geometry , mathematics , cartography , quantum mechanics
Despite documented benefits, the processes described in the new product development literature often prove difficult to follow in practice. A principal source of such difficulties is the phenomenon of fire fighting‐the unplanned allocation of resources to fix problems discovered late in a product's development cycle. While it has been widely criticized, fire fighting is a common occurrence in many product development organizations. To understand both its existence and persistence, in this article I develop a formal model of fire fighting in a multiproject development environment. The major contributions of this analysis are to suggest that: (1) fire fighting can be a self‐reinforeing phenomenon; and (2) multiproject development systems are far more susceptible to this dynamic than is currently appreciated. These insights suggest that many of the current methods for aggregate resource and product portfolio planning, while necessary, are not sufficient to prevent fire fighting and the consequent low performance.