Abstract
Despite its strategic importance most firms managing complex product development fail to meet their pre-set or emerging targets. This thesis argues that this is due to a number of limitations in the fundamental assumptions behind the dominant approach based on planning. Two alternative approaches are introduced and elaborated based on extensive empirical investigation of five organizational settings at Ericsson applying the dominant approach and two organizational settings also at Ericsson that repeatedly succeed to meet pre-set and emerging targets. The two alternative approaches; integrationdriven developmentand dynamic synchronization are based on integration, building dependencies, allocating resources to the boundaries and building a capacity for real-time handling of both emerging problems and opportunities rather than minimizing deviations from the pre-set plan.