- Leadership Focus on Product Development as a Key Business Process
- The Strategic View of Top-Line Growth
- Enabling Your Product Development Process to Have the Ability to Produce the Right Data, Deliverables, and Measures of Risk within the Context of Your Phase/Gate Structure
- Executive Commitment to Driving Culture Change
- Summary
- References
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Enabling Your Product Development Process to Have the Ability to Produce the Right Data, Deliverables, and Measures of Risk within the Context of Your Phase/Gate Structure
There is a fine balance that must be maintained between the following elements of a product development strategy:
A clear, flexible, and disciplined product development process
Most companies have a formal, documented product development process.
Most companies do not follow their own process with discipline and rigor.
The process allows for the insufficient development and documentation of the critical parameter data required to properly assess risk at a gate review.
A broad portfolio of tools and best practices
Most product development teams use an anemic, limited set of tools mainly due to time constraints imposed by management deadlines for technology transfer and product launch.
Product development teams have widely varying views regarding what tools should be deployed during product development. This causes the development of insufficient data required to manage phase-by-phase risk accrual.
Management has avoided being prescriptive in requiring specific tool use, thereby requiring a predominantly reactive approach to risk management because they don't get the right data at the right time.
A rigorous approach to project management
Projects are funded without a clear, up-front, integrated project plan that illustrates a balanced use of tools and best practices on a phase-by-phase basis.
Project managers make up their plan as they react to problems—project plans are architected by a reactive strategy rather than a proactive strategy.
Project tasks are not underwritten by a broad portfolio of tools and best practices, assuring a series of self-perpetuating build-test-fix cycles.
Project task timelines are estimated using best case deterministic projections rather than using reasonable statistical estimates of the shortest, likeliest, and longest estimated task cycle-times. Critical path cycle-times need to be analyzed using Monte Carlo simulations.
Chapter 4 provides a detailed discussion of how these three items integrate to estimate, design, and manage cycle-time within the context of DFSS.