An empirical approach to resource forecasting in NPD

This paper documents the novel application of fractional factorial Design of Experiments (DoE) to predicting two important components of New Product Development (NPD) planning: resource demand per function and project phase duration. Rather than employing the traditional approaches which consider an uncertain sequence of events and activities or, correlate resource requirements with product characteristics (weight, features, lines of code etc) this model is based on correlations between resource requirements and the characteristics of a project. Results suggest significant improvements to information accuracy, consistency, transparency and timeliness.