Exploring The Application Of Agile Methods In Product Development And Design

With the increasing development of product design, more and more enterprises have attached importance to product design outsourcing services as business initiatives, in order to highly improve the efficiency of product development process. With the diversification of customer requirements, the outsourcing design has been a very common approach to enterprises in order to fast and efficiently develop and explore more feasible solutions for the new features of products. Design consultancies are mainly responsible for innovative design consulting and product development design. Through exploring the real customer needs and deeply investigating product development process within enterprises, design consultancies could put forward suitable solutions for product development on the basis of maximising the value of user-centered design. Agile methods have the potential of improving the efficiency of the process of product development and design, which would possibly allow design consultancies to achieve highly efficient working patterns to fast adapt to the rapidly changing market. This dissertation would try to explore the possibilities of efficiency improvement of product development and design process in design consultancies by the way of applying the agile methods.Having exploited substantial resources of agile methods and conducted the practical research of design consultancies, this dissertation states that the agile methods could be beneficial to the efficiency improvement of working patterns in design consultancies. In the first place, agile methods could contribute to the highly efficient communication among the development team, customers and external technical experts. During communication, the face-to-face approach is regarded as the most effective way of linking up. The project team should be constantly on the same page and maintain collaborative relationships. Secondly, strategies of agile methods could help improve the efficiency of building product prototypes and testing prototypes to achieve more valuable time for firms. Unlike the software development, the process of product development requires visible prototypes to evaluate new features of products, which usually leads to more development time. Therefore, the agile approach promotes highest-priority features first, which would be conducive to achieve rapid customer feedback and improve the efficiency of prototype development process. Moreover, agile methods offer possibilities of highly flexible working patterns that especially needed in design consultancies. In order to increase the flexibility of working pattern in design consultancies, the development team should have the ability of self-organising and self-managing, reporting streaming status during the process and assist the product to achieve robust development.