APPROACHES TO CRISIS PREVENTION IN LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT BY HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS AND THROUGH RISK MANAGEMENT

The scope of this thesis is research into crisis prevention in lean product development. The focus is on the factors defining high performance teams and risk management approaches for crisis prevention. As a crisis in product development, we understand an unwanted situation with a high time
pressure and pressure for results, occurring late in the development process. Crisis prevention aims at avoiding these situations (see section 2.5). High performance teams are teams that consistently outperform other teams in regard to stakeholder satisfaction (see section 2.3). As risk management, we understand all activities that proactively aim at minimizing the losses
associated with risks (see section 2.4). Risk itself in this thesis is defined as a potential, time dependent loss of value, in a complex causal network (see section 2.4).