Integrated product team

An integrated product team, often shortened to IPT, is a multidisciplinary group of people who are collectively responsible for delivering a defined product or process. Teams of this kind are used in complex development programs and projects for review and decision making, and their emphasis is on bringing all the stakeholders, including users, customers, management, developers and contractors, into one collaborative forum. An integrated product team may work at the level of a whole program, but there may also be oversight teams and working-level teams beneath it. The method is most often created as part of structured systems engineering methodologies, where it focuses attention on understanding the needs and desires of each stakeholder. The approach was introduced to the United States Department of Defense in 1995, as part of what the department described as a fundamental change in the way it acquires goods and services. It is also the team approach that concurrent engineering is sometimes described as using, in which design, manufacturing and other functions are brought together to shorten the time needed to bring a new product to market.