It Worked There, So It Should Work Here: Sustaining Change while Improving Product Development Processes

Abstract

Organizations operate under ongoing pressure to conduct product development (PD) in ways that reduce errors, improve product designs, and increase speed and efficiency. Often, managers are expected to respond to this pressure by implementing process improvement programs (PIPs) based on best practices elsewhere (e.g., in another part of their organization or in another industrial context). Successful PIP implementation depends on two criteria: (a) demonstrating (symbolic) success by meeting externally imposed deadlines and producing mandated artifacts and (b) sustaining the expected (substantive) changes in their employees' underlying beliefs and practices. Given the mixed success of PIPs in nonmanufacturing contexts, identifying factors that contribute to both symbolic and substantive implementation is important to both researchers and practitioners. We explore this challenge through an in‐depth field study at a PD company (DevCo) that implemented a PIP across its 11 PD projects. We examine DevCo's change message to implement the PIP, how DevCo's engineers experienced it, factors that impeded implementation, and factors that could improve substantive success. Along with this empirical evidence, we leverage organizational change concepts to facilitate effective PIP implementation in new contexts such as PD. We distill our findings into eight propositions that expand theory about effectively transferring PIPs across contexts.