Cross-Disciplinary Methods

By the 1980s, it was apparent that many organizations mistakenly implemented a waterfall-like process, with separate teams working on each phase and only the project management team having purview over all activities. After several expensive and somewhat infamous project failures, it was clear that end-to-end involvement of the right set of knowledge, experience, and perspectives was a better way to develop complex systems and place them into service. The integrated product team (IPT) model and the integrated product and process development (IPPD) approach were widely adopted. Today, IPTs and IPPDs are in use across industries and government activities.

An IPT is a team of stakeholders and individuals who possess various skills and work together to achieve a defined process or product. IPTs are specifically designed to be cross-functional and draw expertise from various disciplines to foster a holistic and collaborative approach to system development.

IPT members should also provide enough representation from all project stakeholders, such as owners, managers, developers, designers, contractors, and security professionals, to ensure effective collaboration in achieving the requirements of the result.

In complex systems projects, it's hard to make the right choices for development management, manufacturing, and test and verification strategies at the outset of the project. This is largely due to the inherent uncertainty and emergent behavior associated with complex systems.

IPPD acknowledges the challenges in complex projects and aims to address it by emphasizing an iterative and collaborative approach where these choices are refined and evolved throughout the project life cycle.

High-risk technologies or unproved algorithms might need to first be explored with demonstrator activities, before all stakeholders know enough to specify a clear set of requirements and the management processes to get systems built to meet those requirements. Thus, while the product and its functionality are explored, the design layout and other constraints create the process that results in the best product possible.

IPPD can also be used as a management technique that combines essential acquisition activities using skilled teams to optimize the design, manufacturing, and supportability processes of the result.

An advantage of IPPD is the ability to facilitate meeting cost and performance objectives from product or system concept through development and production, including support after placing into production.

One of the key goals of IPPD is to facilitate multi-skilled team members working together through the concept of IPTs. These teams comprise skilled representatives from all involved functional disciplines working together with a team leader to build successful and efficient applications. The need to identify and resolve issues and make sound and timely decisions is facilitated as everyone is working together, from different perspectives and disciplines. This includes allowing team decisions to be made based on input from the entire team that would include, for example, engineering, manufacturing, management, financial management, procurement, legal, and, of course, security. The teams may also include customers and contractors in some

include customers and contractors in some instances; in other words, these teams may involve members from both the enterprise and the contactors or consultants.