Fast and Flexible - A Lean, Rapid and Profitable Stage-Gate Framework: Summary of Audio Session 

Event Summaries—Related Links:  Audio | Transcript (16 pages) | Slides

Dr. Robert G. Cooper is the founder of the Stage-Gate process and President of the Product Development Institute.  He is a widely-published and best-selling author on product development, R&D, and innovation.  Dr. Cooper recently spoke with MRT members about how to use stage gates in the development process to maximize productivity, flexibility and speed.  This report summarizes his comments. 
(5 pages)

Design for Uncertainty: Audio Session Summary 

Event Summaries, Presentations—Related Links: 
Slides (29 pages) | Transcript (22 pages) | Audio

In this audio session, Preston Smith, of consultancy New Product Dynamics, presents techniques for enhancing flexible product development. He discusses why flexibility is valuable and mentions some of the tradeoffs involved. Smith also discusses the role of customers and their requirements in a flexible environment. He presents some detailed techniques for fostering a flexible product development process through product architectures, experimentation and the use of set-based design. He also examines the impact of flexible product development on internal factors such as development teams, decision-making, project management and the product development process. This presentation provides a comprehensive overview of some of the latest thinking on innovative, flexible approaches to product development.
(11 pages)

Using External Resources to Eliminate Product Development Queues 

Feature Articles—By Don Reinertsen, Reinertsen and Associates
Experienced product developers realize that there is a heavy price to be paid for operating a development organization at 100 percent utilization.  Unless we could perfectly predict the work content of design tasks, when these tasks arrive, and the productivity of our individual development workers, such high levels of loading will cause queues in product development.  Internal capacity is only one of a variety of paths to increase the capacity of the development organization.  External capacity is a powerful alternative.  However, using external capacity to support product development can be a little trickier than it first appears.  In this commentary, Don Reinertsen discusses one of the common pitfalls of managing external capacity – the tactic known as “peak-shaving” – and how to avoid it.
(3 pages)

Held Hostage by Delayed Technology? 

Feature Articles—Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates
For product developers, new technology can be our best friend or our worst enemy.  It can be an unparalleled tool to improve product performance.  An inelegant design using new technology often outperforms even the most brilliant design using old technology.  Unfortunately, new technology has a dark side, introducing uncertainty into schedule and performance goals.  Since a project can be as uncertain as its most uncertain element, the entire project schedule can be contaminated by the uncertainty of a single underlying technology.  In this brief article, Don Reinertsen argues that the key is to keep technology off the critical path.  He presents several ways of pursuing this strategy as well as an analytic approach for articulating the economic argument.
(3 pages)

Rethinking the Stage-Gate® Process – A Reply to the Critics 

Feature Articles, Methodologies & Best Practices—with Bob Becker, Product Development Executive, Advisor and MRT FastTrack Expert Panelist

In this article, Bob Becker responds to recent criticisms of the Stage-Gate® process. Becker argues that Stage-Gate remains a useful model but the key is in the implementation. Most of the defects in Stage-Gate implementations are due to rigid applications of the process that do not take advantage of common opportunities to perform some activities in parallel or to adapt the process to the type of project at hand. For Stage-gates to be a success, says Becker, it is necessary to plan projects to be right sized and efficient. The gates in the process should serve as business checkpoints; these checks should be performed with both the marketplace and the portfolio in mind. Becker also answers, point-by-point, the critics of the Stage-Gate framework. Concludes Becker: “A process that leverages historical learning and best practices from industry leaders, and which is also right sized for the mission at hand, is as close to optimal as you’ll get.”
(5 pages)

Achieving Speed in New Product Development:  Transcript of Audio Session 

Transcripts—In this transcript of a member’s-only audio session, Lawrie Cunningham (Black & Decker) and Preston Smith (New Product Dynamics) discuss a broad range of issues related to product development speed including: the role of decision-making in fast cycle time; the advantages of co-located teams and the pitfalls of outsourcing product development; critical trade-offs between time, cost and quality; enabling technologies for fast cycle-time; a ‘first-to-market’ vs. a ‘fast-follower’ strategy; and the requirements of highly regulated and highly complex product development environments.
(18 pages)

Achieving Speed in New Product Development:  Summary of Audio Session 

Event Summaries—Related Links:  Audio - mp3 or wma | Transcript (18 pages)

In this summary of a member’s-only audio session, Lawrie Cunningham (Black & Decker) and Preston Smith (New Product Dynamics) discuss a broad range of issues related to product development speed including: the role of decision-making in fast cycle time; the advantages of co-located teams and the pitfalls of outsourcing product development; critical trade-offs between time, cost and quality; enabling technologies for fast cycle-time; a ‘first-to-market’ vs. a ‘fast-follower’ strategy; and the requirements of highly regulated and highly complex product development environments. 
(8 pages)

Fast & Flexible Development Insights from Harvard Business School 

Presentations—The argument for flexible product development is that there is not one best way of conducting design and development.  Rather, the development process should be designed to suit the specific context of a given project.  Tthe first stage of any development effort should be to define the most appropriate development process for the specific project.  Thus, a phase-gate process is neither inherently bad nor always the most appropriate option.  In uncertain development contexts in which many technology and/or market changes occur during the project cycle, an inflexible phase-gate model is not the most effective approach.  Alan MacCormack, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations management area at the Harvard Business School, conducted research in the software industry during a time of high uncertainty (1996-1998).  His work shows that levers of control can exist in a flexible development world, although they are not the same levers as those applied in a traditional phase-gate model.  Download the slides (41 pages) for a presentation in which Alan MacCormack shares his findings and then download a summary of his remarks below.
(6 pages)

Using the Design Structure Matrix to Manage Product Development Risk 

Methodologies & Best Practices—The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is a tool that maps information flow and its impact in product development processes.  DSM represents visually the network of interactions among development activities and facilitates analysis of the results of changing the sequence of these interactions.  The tool reveals trade-off options and implications between cost and schedule risk.  This report summarizes a talk by Dr. Tyson Browning, Assistant Professor of Enterprise Operations at the M.J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University.  Tyson is a former Senior Project Manager in Integrated Company Operations at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, where he served as the technical lead and chief integrator for a number of teams in developing the enterprise process architecture for the company.  In this talk Tyson presents DSM as an approach for managing development project cost, schedule and risk.  Click here for presentation slides (34 pages), and then download the summary below.
(6 pages).

Fast & Flexible Insights from Tektronix: Using the "Bounding Box" to Accelerate Development 

Case Studies, Interviews, Methodologies & Best Practices—The bounding box is a tool used jointly by project teams and management in the early stages of development to set project parameters rather than deadlines and targets.  This approach allows a team to manage its own efforts as long as it remains within the parameters that define success.  As new and better information becomes available, a team and management can re-negotiate and adapt the boundaries accordingly.  The tool ensures that the critical success factors of an individual project are identified up front, allows education of management about potential risk factors, establishes criteria for management intervention, and allows teams to move forward with incomplete information.  Laura Doyle is a former Program Manger with Tektronix, where she managed and applied new product development process improvements.  This report summarizes of Laura's remarks on using the bounding box approach to speed development in uncertain markets. Click here to download the presentation slides for Laura's talk.
(Summary: 9 pages; Slides: 22 pages)