Commercial Aircraft Projects: Managing the Development of Highly Complex Products

Commercial aircraft are by their nature extremely complex products, and their development equally complex and challenging. This should require the highest level of project management sophistication but in reality it cannot be afforded. However, cost reductions can be achieved by concentrating on the essential elements of such disciplines, to maintain their principal strengths, and combining them in an intelligent and pragmatic way. This is why the management of commercial aircraft must be performed on the basis of affordable essentials taken from state-of-the-art management disciplines as well as through an integrated architecture. Where this book goes beyond management essentials found elsewhere is its treatment of architecture integration, necessary to interlink product, process and resources data. Only with this connectedness can the interoperation of the management essentials yield maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Commercial Aircraft Projects: Managing the Development of Highly Complex Products proposes an integrated architecture and details step-by-step how it can be used for the management of commercial aircraft development projects. The findings presented can also be applied to other industrial sectors producing hardware based on design inputs.