An Approach for Agile Engineering Change Management Within Global Product Development

Engineering Change Management (ECM) is an essential constituent of any product development project, these project are highly dynamic process of knowledge generation and reuse for products, projects, processes and resources within a enterprise. Currently, ECM is fully document-, and at least partially paper-based, and needs to be transformed to a fully model-based standard workflow. Changes, uncertainty and hidden processes should be seen as regular events. For the agile process, a rapid and flexible handling of task items is necessary. Due to the unpredictable character and short time of singular task items, we have developed a new approach to collect all changes to a superordinate, master change note as a standard, common object in the product structure, and to and update this master change note as often as necessary. This change note is assigned to a product during its entire lifecycle. It collects changes in the product and related processes and equipment. We present a new approach in order to facilitate a full object-oriented support of all activities related to the change process. On each update, singular task items can be re-prioritized within this master change note according to the current needs.