Project Management

The complexity of managing teams can be overwhelming. There's probably no better example of this than the field of product development. Not only can getting a product to market be a time consuming and tedious process, but it's no secret that it also takes a lot of manpower to perform a variety of specialized tasks. Who performs these tasks, depends, of course, on how a specific organization is setup. No matter how small or large a company may be, the process always starts with the marketing, business and sales specialists who work on the product specification / definition, performance specification / definition and ascertain market worthiness. The marketing specialists then pass it on to human factors specialists who define/specify the look and feel for the engineering and design specialists to be able to specify components for the manufacturing specialists. The manufacturing specialists come up with a protype followed by a pilot production and the product also undergoes product and safety testing. This is followed by the legal specialists, who work on creating all literature and documentation such as a manual and the distribution and packaging specialists find the best way to get the product to the shelf for the consumer to purchase. Depending on the type of product and how the organizations producing the product are setup these groups may differ a bit, but this is the general picture. This example can be used as a model for any company, large or small, who have a concept that they would like to bring to market.