Original Date: 04/28/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) represent a new way of doing business at Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles (E&M) and involve both customers and suppliers. The IPT concept integrates Total Quality Management (TQM) initiatives such as high performance work groups, people empowerment, quality of work life, culture change, concurrent engineering, design-to-cost and schedule, continuous process improvement, and customer and supplier involvement. Fostering ownership at the appropriate levels, facilitating empowerment efforts, and better distributing the workload are principal objectives of the IPT concept. Other objectives include moving decisions down the organization, making all personnel stakeholders, allocating metrics, building in all requirements, and organizing for communications.

Implementation of IPTs at Lockheed Martin has been facilitated in several areas. For example, team members are physically collocated and organized based on the project Work Breakdown Structure. Appropriate training is also provided for all members. Clear roles and responsibilities are established; concise program management plans are developed; and daily meetings are conducted and attended by DPRO and supplier representatives. Most importantly, senior management is supported and committed to the IPT concept.

Programs using IPTs have experienced dramatic improvements in cost, schedule, and performance over traditionally- structured programs. Other benefits include total "management-in-the-sunshine" with customers and upper management, elimination of redundant activities, and work done in parallel (not in series).

Lockheed Martin learned several lessons from this approach including requiring more team responsibility for cost control; ensuring better training for team leaders; and acknowledging that up-front costs are high but are recovered later. Future IPT initiatives will address improving the middle management commitment to IPTs and breaking down functional barriers, including IPT implementation costs in proposals.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.