The Superweight Project Team and Manager

This paper presents a model for managing product development projects in which new strategic platforms that are of paramount importance to a company are developed. The model incorporales a superweight manager who manages a "live or die" strategic programme across different projects. From this study, an additional model emerges besides the four generic types of product development, project organisations and leadership presented by Clark and Wheelwright (1993a). The analysis was conducted by screening data into five categories, namely, strategic control of the project, resource allocation, organisational structure, targets and leadership. The data were collected through interviews and validated by triangulation and internal seminars.