Resource profiling with multi-disciplined teams

In today´s world of fast moving technology, products are required to meet more challenging requirements as customer expectations rise. Diversity of function, greater reliability, ease of use and lower product cost place increased demands on development teams who are working to deliver more products on shorter development cycle times and corresponding lower development expense. The ideal team for rapid product development is drawn from all functional areas and dedicated to the project from conception to volume production. Such a team would have members from Marketing, Service, Manufacturing, Development and Finance who would live and breathe the product to ensure profitability in the market place. Unfortunately, this ideal team is wasteful of resource as not all the team is required 100% of the time throughout the product creation cycle. For efficient use of valuable development skills, it is necessary to manage their deployment across projects. This requires good planning, communications and a flexible approach by the team. This paper examines the challenges of resource balancing for multi-disciplined teams to increase efficiency in the use of development skills