The Product Development Process (PDP) has increasing influence on companies' strategic results. Eliciting improvement opportunities in PDP is a non-trivial task, and has motivated researchers to propose approaches to rationalize the effort of sophisticating PDP Management (PDPM). This paper presents a method to measure the maturity of the PDPM and to prioritize improvement projects in that area. The maturity measurement is performed by quantifying relationships between the PDPM's knowledge areas and typical problems present in PDP. To rank improvement opportunities, critical knowledge areas are deployed into Best Practices, to which improvement opportunities are related and prioritized using a Multi-attribute Utility method. The proposed method is illustrated in a case study centered on a software development industry.
PDP management; PDP improvement; Maturity models