Abstract
Due to shortening product life cycles, businesses are looking for ways to reduce the time of product development. In light of this, it seems unlikely for firms to rely on a single technique or knowledge to develop products, and functional departments should endeavour to reduce conflicts and cooperate in a project. Therefore, project management (PM) is anticipated to play an integrated role to manage corporate resources with the constraints of time and cost to produce the highest quality of products. The traditional standards and guidance of PM focus on the tasks that need to be done in a project. However, the approach of applying the standards and guidance to an existing product development process is not sufficiently illustrated. To fill this gap, this research utilises the 47 PM processes proposed by Project Management Institute (PMI, 2013) as framework. A questionnaire was designed, distributed to a Taiwanese earphone manufacturing company, and analysed with Kano model. The survey result indicates 14 processes relatively important to improve, among which seven were selected to the final stage. Quality function deployment (QFD) was then utilised to integrate the PM tools and techniques with those seven items. By means of this systematic methodology, firms are able to identify the weakness of their product development process, and improve their PM performance.