Faster Isn’t Always Better When Developing New Products
Choosing the right set of projects to work on is necessary to reduce a product’s time-to-market.
The manufacturing industry has placed tremendous emphasis on eliminating wasted time. There's been a lot of focus on how to extract waste from the product design cycle.
The manufacturing industry has placed tremendous emphasis on eliminating wasted time from the product design cycle; however, faster may not always be better. Significant progress already has been achieved by automating processes, eliminating prototype iterations with virtual models, and improving project execution. These efforts follow from a common belief that product tradeoffs involve three dimensions - time, feature quantity and quality; pick any two and the third is calculated. Of course, quality is almost always the first pick, competition demands a given set of features and first-to-market products have the best chance to win. Given the need to excel on all three dimensions, the only option is to wring out wasted time; however, faster may not be better - if you are working on the wrong projects, the efforts hold the wrong focus.
The speed-to-market approach works fine when the company focuses on a small number of products; however, many companies deliver dozens, hundreds or even thousands of products, all vying for some share of precious company resources. Each product effort carries varying pressures attributable to customer needs, market dynamics and economic conditions. The result often is a chaotic project selection process in which decisions are based on the influence of strong customers, internal product advocates or both.
So, despite minimizing time-to-market via perfect execution, the chaos surrounding the selection process poses significant risks for product success. Current efforts may delay or eliminate other opportunities more closely aligned to company goals and objectives. Unplanned resource conflicts - people, manufacturing and launch efforts - may delay several activities, which multiplies the overall impact on the company. The ability to change quickly becomes a shot in the dark with no foundation to gauge the impact of decisions. As a result, projects finish on time and under budget, but the company fails because products do not achieve margins or capture expected market share. Clearly, just getting products to market faster isn't enough - choosing the right set of projects is required.
Choosing the Right Product Projects
Product introduction velocity must be balanced against business
decision agility in order to choose the right product projects on which
to work. Most company executives are fully capable of making effective
decisions given enough current information. Making right, real-time
project and product decisions adds a fourth dimension to project
planning and selection - a portfolio perspective. When the wrong
projects are selected with high product velocity, the result may be a
faster route to product disaster. Gaining this perspective requires
slicing through the project chaos to assemble a real-time view across
all activities. Achieving a real-time portfolio view provides the
ability to choose the right project based on company goals and
objectives. Building a portfolio involves three distinct challenges:
1. Gathering key product/project details without adding overhead, delay to the project or both
2. Synchronizing the details relative to the project's state or stage of its life cycle
3. Automating the generation of meaningful information to help in choosing the right projects
Gathering Project Details
Achieving a product portfolio perspective without incurring significant
overhead, expense or both poses an enormous challenge for many
companies. Traditionally, the information is gathered from the bottom
up through the managerial hierarchy. This incurs significant aging of
the information as well as interpretive adjustment as information is
assembled and consolidated. By the time details roll up to the
executive decision team, the data may be too old or too skewed to make
an effective decision.
A familiar approach to gaining perspective on chaos of the project involves real-time capture of key metrics directly relevant to product decisions. Typical metrics include the customer benefits, risk assessments, current and future costs, future product returns and current project status. Much of the supporting data already exists within the individual project teams' knowledge sets.
Internet-based collaborative approaches offer the perfect conduit to communicate project and product details across teams and companies. However, major challenges to successful deployment include technology costs and disruptive intrusion into the product innovation environment. Horror stories abound in which massive IT undertakings included too many barriers to project operation and failed during the adoption phase. Barriers included the following:
- Operation similar to a continuous status report
- Rigid process operation
- Limited end user control over notifications
- Redundant data entry
Synchronizing the Details
Synchronizing the information across all activities with the life cycle
of the individual projects involves alignment along a common process.
Most manufactured products follow some level of formal introduction
methodology - phase-gate, gated-review, waterfall, and so on. Project
data evolves with the project throughout the process. Capturing details
in the context of a company's process is critical to developing a
portfolio view.
Generating Meaningful Information
Simply gathering project details into a single place does not yield the
portfolio answer. Transformation of data into information requires
analysis and filtering. In the scope of product portfolios, this
transformation must be automated to achieve decision-making agility.
One of the key challenges to successful automation involves figuring
out which analyses offer the clearest views for making decisions. For
example, the high risks associated with products entering the launch
phase require different decisions from similar risks for a future
product proposal. In this case, the analysis may include risk, reward
and sunk cost to identify critical issues. The analyses determine which
details are involved, which translates into metrics captured at the
project operation level. An additional challenge lies in the need to
adjust the analysis based on the dynamics of the current situation.
When considering technology-based solutions, be sure that the analysis
framework provides both automation and flexibility to adjust on the fly.
Summary
The speed-to-market approach may not always be the best choice. Working
on the wrong projects faster may simply accelerate company disasters.
When viewed in isolation, the success of one product may hide greater
opportunities. Looking at all products collectively as a portfolio
offers the ability to see tradeoffs in the context of company goals and
objectives. However, achieving a true portfolio perspective can be a
daunting challenge. Recent technology offerings provide portfolio
insight to help choose the right projects. When looking for a
technology solution, be sensitive to end user overhead and the ability
to reconfigure analyses very quickly. The ideal solution will reduce
end user efforts without requiring major IT projects and maintenance.
