Successful risk management approaches in product development organizations: A case study experience

This article discusses experiences from case studies conducted at product developing departments in four multinational companies. All organizations are outstanding product developing companies with a long and successful historical background within product development. Therefore it is interesting to understand how these companies deal with risks in their product development processes. The aim of the paper is to find out if the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) concept supports the need of industrial companies to deal with risks in their product development projects. The results show that DFSS promotes the company needs to some extent. There is a great method support in DFSS regarding how to consider technical risks. On the other hand, all companies included in this study would need more support to highlight the holistic perspective concerning cross functional collaborations, increased communication and avoiding sub-optimizations in development project, a requirement that is not sufficiently supported.