New Product Development
Mike Bresko, Managing Director; and John McNeil, Principal Consultant
New Product Development is widely recognized as a leading source of competitive advantage. Most companies have instituted a process for managing product development, yet this area continues to be a source of frustration, lost opportunities and financial drain. Why?
New Product Development is a complex dance involving almost every function in a business over extended periods of time. And businesses are notoriously poor at managing inter-functional projects, while we humans are notoriously poor at keeping the short term at bay while maintaining a measured focus on the longer term. The answer to these conundrums often lies in the implementation of a structured process founded on a team approach. So far so good: we are all familiar with standardized processes and we can all recite the benefits of teams. So what do we commonly do wrong? Well too often we have found a slavish reliance on a poorly defined process with little room for imagination and a capitulation of individual responsibility to the team process, leaving little room for passion.
A good first step in allowing for imaginative input to the development process is to remove the interferences of rework, late changes and conflicting design components by creating a strong set of structured steps with clear roles, responsibilities and deliverables. We favor the stage-gate process, with checkpoints at significant milestones where the development team reassures themselves, their supervising team (and the organization as a whole) that they are ready and prepared to proceed to the next stage of development. Between three and six stages may be appropriate depending on your circumstances, each broken down into steps; hundreds of which may be defined and even those broken down into sub-steps to allow for project time minimization and concurrency.
A good first step in promoting passion is to define the roles of the product development team clearly in contrast to the roles of the oversight team reviewing the gates. Oversight input is needed early and clearly (read quantitatively) in order to allow the team the freedom to deliver on company and customer needs quickly and effectively. A matching good step is to define the roles of the team members clearly in contrast to their normal duties and obligations. For companies launching a new process, this work will be even more onerous as the team members both change the wheel and drive the car at the same time. The freedom provided by these clear definitions provide the necessary foundation for commitment and enthusiasm.
So as is usual these days, we must strike a careful balance. New Product success relies on managing the paradoxes of imaginative freedom through process structure, and passion through tight role definition.
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