The ability to expeditiously develop and market new products is one of the crucial success factors in competitive environments.

As a consequence, streamlining product development processes has become an important tool to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Managing development processes can be a formidable task, though. Large development processes can require the coordination of thousands of individual design activities with complex information dependencies and couplings between them.

In this paper, we develop methodologies to structure product development processes under consideration of development time and costs.

Traditional tools for shortening development lead times are; 1. Activity crashing 2. Concurrent exploration of alternatives 3. Overlapping of activities. In all three approaches time-cost trade-off curves are generally presumed to be convex and decreasing.

Thus, for reasons outlined below, shorter development times can generally only be achieved by incurring additional expenses during the development process. For crashing, the additional costs are attributed to diminishing returns from additional personnel and the need for more communication between the involved parties

In networks of activities, crashing along the critical path increases the net- work's density, causing a gradual increase in the number of activities to be crashed to further decrease the project duration

Overlapping of activities typically introduces a higher level of uncertainty into the process that causes additional rework and thus higher costs.

Finally, concurrent exploration of different alternatives leads to earlier determination of a feasible solution, while more effort is wasted on alternatives not to be pursued later

Thus, it is far from obvious how to structure development processes, nor are existing structures necessarily efficient. In particular, coupling constraints between activities are one of the major causes for iterations. Iterations in turn, increase project costs and completion times and are a major source for lengthy and expensive development processes