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5.2.1.2 Resistance to Changing the Product Development Processes
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There is a semi-conductor company in the western part of the United States that
has two long hallways (that lead to and from the corporate cafeteria) lined with
engineering patents awarded to individuals in the product engineering organization.
It is a display of corporate pride. When that company was automating their prod-
uct development processes, the non-engineer members of the PLM implementation
team walked down those long hallways everyday. They would pass the patents with
the names of the product engineers who had over the years made that company a
leader in its market. Many of the names on those patents were the same names on
the PLM implementation team roster.
Product engineers are most often the “go-to” people in a company - they are
the people with the answers to the difficult, differentiating questions that companies
face in this ultra-competitive place of business today. It should be no surprise to
anyone that these highly esteemed, highly decorated, successfully critical people
are also generally resistant to change in the product development processes.
Developing and patenting an answer to a difficult technical problem and know-
ing whether to change a development process to better fit a PLM solution are two
different types of tasks. One thing is fairly certain, product engineers are much more
comfortable in addressing a technical product design challenge than they are in rep-
resenting their colleagues and defining a standard process that all engineers should
follow. It is not that the engineer is incapable of contributing ideas to modify devel-
opment processes to fit the PLM solution; it is just not what they are trained to do
and therefore the task ends up being difficult and stressful to complete.
Product engineers often initially view being part of the PLM implementation
team as a “nuisance” responsibility that can be addressed with a couple of hours
or a day's attention. However, the engineer quickly learns that although the product
development topics and processes are quite familiar to them, the decision-making
and the tradeoffs associated with PLM implementation are very complex and con-
flicting. For product engineers who are used to “solving” complex problems (the
patents to prove it), such a situation often leads to significant level of frustration and
sometimes even embarrassment. What PLM implementation project team does not
have at least one story of a senior engineer fellow who gets so mad at a project com-
promise that they stomp out of the room verbally threatening to never rejoin unless
their feature request has been added to the project's scope? It's true.
5.2.2 “Not Invented Here” Attitude of the Product Engineer
Engineers invent and develop products. Historically, engineers also developed auto-
mated solutions to help them execute product development processes. Version
control, partner collaboration, and change approval management are examples of
individual functions that the engineering community has addressed through small
one-off programming efforts over the years. Disparate, undocumented, loosely man-
aged “program scripts” running on an engineer's computer - located under the
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