Integration studies of coupling custom project life cycle with custome project governance framework in the high mix, low volume industry

The demand for solution providers is trending, and as a result, manufacturing organizations, more than ever, are being challenged to transform from hardware-centric to solution-centric. Failure to do so could be catastrophic. Many manufacturing organizations have started the transformation in order to stay in business and for enhancement of growth prospects. However, transforming from hardware-centric to solution-centric has faced tough challenges. To overcome this, they have started to apply customization on either project life cycle or project governance to enhance the chances of success. Formulating the best practices depends on many factors which includes functionality, usability, design, provision, utilization, effectiveness and other factors which may crop up. Yet, the overall value is unknown. Conversely, there is a lack of custom project life cycle characteristics that can be located. The customization work for project life cycle would be challenging by not integrating the custom project life cycle characteristics into the development work. Similarly, limited research has been conducted to gauge the effectiveness of custom project life cycle coupling with custom project governance framework especially for manufacturing organization in the high mix, low volume businesses. Hence, a multi-method qualitative study for this non-numerical data driven research is initiated, aiming to improve understanding of the value of custom project life cycle coupling with custom project governance framework for manufacturing organization as well as to test the instrumental perspective of personalization theory. This research relied on both longitudinal and cross-sectional case studies to yield a more detailed picture of the phenomenon under study. The longitudinal case study that involved manufacturing organization A enabled the identification of custom project life cycle characteristics and a series of development works prior to secondary data collection and pattern matching analysis. For cross-sectional case studies that involved manufacturing organizations B, C and D, the research depended on heterogenous purposive sampling technique to provide the maximum variation possible in the data collected through face-to-face interviews to detail picture of its effectiveness, prior to themes searching via thematic analysis. Subsequently, relationships among variables were tested. The overall analysis was validated via triangulation. The findings suggest that custom project life cycle that coupled with custom project governance framework would enhance chances of success for manufacturing organization transformation in the high mix, low volume industry. In addition, this would allow researchers and practitioners to develop their own intangible customization of personalization that suits and fulfils their needs. It is recommended that in future, solution projects with higher deal sizes in other manufacturing business segments are investigated, alongside post deployment support and the use of statistical measures to confirm the additional relationships between the variables be explored.