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Byline: Hans Wortmann, Alex Alblas Product platforms are used to specify a (virtual) company's offering to the market in terms of functionality and performance. The specification covers a range of actual products and services and the platform includes choice features, options and external interfaces. Usually, the platform also specifies a number of internal interfaces, in such a way that the common architecture of the products is specified by the platform. The components of a product platform can by itself act as a recursively-defined smaller platform. Like many other artefacts, platforms have a life cycle. In this paper, we discuss the life cycle of the platform in various industries, such as industrial machinery, aerospace, automotive and product software. This paper describes requirements for platform life cycle management and concludes that there are strong arguments to distinguish platform life cycle management from the more common Product Life Cycle (PLC) management, and that best practices in various industries deserve to be generalised.

Risk management is an instrument used by project managers to execute and control their projects to assure that outcomes are aligned with project plans. Existing evidence for the contribution of this instrument to project success is not convincing, because this evidence is often based on assumptions that prove inaccurate for most projects. These assumptions were addressed in an experiment involving 53 project groups. The results from this experiment demonstrate that the use of risk identification, a single risk management activity, positively influences objective and perceived project success. Communication between project members during risk identification plays a crucial role in this relation.