I was giving a presentation about project management last week, and one of the participants mentioned that the Ford Mustang product development project was an example of a project that was a failure by project management standards (over budget, missed deadlines, etc.) but yielded a stunningly successful product. I said, “Cite!” but apparently he wasn’t a Doper.
If this is true, it would be a great example to illustrate the distinction between project execution metrics vs. value to enterprise. I have done a lot of web searching but everything talks about the success of Iococca’s marketing ideas but not the actual development process.
Has anyone ever seen a case study that describes the Mustang product development project?
Understanding the limitations and caveats necessary to any Wikipedia source, the Wiki article on Ford Mustang has this to say:
Now, it is possible that the stylists blew their budget and were covered by the engineers re-using Falcon technology, but that does not look like a project disaster, to me.
I would think that any decent sized library would have a number of books that included the story of the Mustang, from which you could glean the project development record.
(If you need examples of sour projects developing wonderful products, you might look into the histories of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning or the Martin
B-26 Marauder. Each of them had serious teething troubles that were overcome to produce outstanding aircraft. In one of the books on the P-38, (but I cannot recall whether it was Martin Caidin’s Fork-Tailed Devil or another one), the whole process is laid out of the engineers having to repeatedly fix issues, based on pilot complaints. I do not know whether any book has been similarly written regarding the B-26.)
Actually, I think he’s thinking about the Ford Taurus development, which while it resulted in a successful car that was seen as the salvation of Ford Motor in the mid-1980’s, was over budget, over weight, and late. The man who led the development (I want to say Lou Venturi, though I’m probably wrong - I’ll have to look it up when I get home) eventually left the company within a few years. His wife is still bitter about how he was treated afterwards.
My understanding is that while the Ford mustang was a big sales success, the car itself was mediocre-it was basically a new body on a FALCON (cheap low-end FORD car), and suffered from all kinds of rattles and squeeks-chiefly because of sparse body welds. In addition, they cut all kinds of corners-the gas tank was not isolated from the trunk floor-so rear end collisions could be very dangerous. I also recall that while the car was OK with a low-torque 6-cylinder engine, the addition of a powerful V-8 made the car dangerously unstable and the excess torque qwould strees the body.
All in all, a pretty car with a lot of flaws. i remember my late uncle bought one new-wuthin two years it was a rattletrap. i also remember that his car was equipped with an ersatz “steroe”-is had a monaural radio with something called a 'reverb"-it was a mechanical delay line that gave a stereo-like effect-except when you hit a bump-then your music was pure distortion.
But FORD and Iococca made a TON of money on the Mustang. it was what buyers wanted, and sold very well for years.
You DO realize, I hope, that this sentence makes your other observations irrelevant? Ford is not (and has never been) in business for the purpose of manufacturing the finest vehicle of its time. Beginning with the T and the A, the purpose of the company has been to make a lot of money by selling a lot of cars to as many people as they can. This is not to say that they have ever deliberately built junk, but that if the product happens to have turned out to be junk, it is still judged purely on popularity and sales. By that standard, no rattle or squeak in the world can diminish the Rustang’s success.
