Number 93 – Use 3P to Assist in Conducting Projects Audie Penn, July 11, 2026 Use 3P to Assist in Conducting Projects Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic 3P is most often used once — at the start of design, to select an approach before the real work begins. Used this way, it does what it was built to do. But its value does not have to end at concept selection. You can even use 3P to assist in conducting projects. 3P holds up best when it runs the full length of a project, from design through manufacturing, rather than stopping at the first decision point. Stopping early is not a misuse of the tool. It is simply the tool’s native scope, left unextended. In concurrent product and process development, this looks like comparison run wide before a decision is made narrow. Manufacturing cost gets evaluated across every identified process option, not just the one already favored. Similar components get compared across machine families, surfacing cost variance that a single-option review would never expose. Specification gets traced backward from the 3D model itself, revealing where a design choice quietly creates an extra setup, or misses a common material thickness that would have improved nesting efficiency downstream. This is not a second tool layered onto 3P. It is the same discipline, simply not stopped at the first gate. The comparison that happens at concept selection is the same comparison that can happen again at design, and again at process — each time with more information available than the time before. Use 3P to Assist in Conducting Projects None of this replaces a decision. One process still wins, on cost and on quality. But the decision is only as sound as the comparison behind it — and the comparison only reveals what it can see, across as many stages as it is allowed to reach. Limited to one stage, 3P narrows the field once and moves on. Extended across stages, it keeps narrowing the field as new information arrives — from concept, into design, into the specifics of manufacturing — until what remains is not just an option that survived, but one that was tested against everything else at every point it could have failed. The direction was always there. It becomes visible as the process moves forward, not before it starts. Questions For Your Consideration Where in your own process does 3P stop too early? What would it reveal if it ran the full length instead? Where has a decision already been made before the comparison was wide enough to trust it? What would the assessment need to see, at every stage, to keep narrowing the field honestly? More OpEx 4 OpEx OpEx 4 OpEx