But how can manufacturers, designers, and developers ensure they are on top of every stage from the original concept design through to project completion and distribution to the customer? Steve Beaumont reports.
Many organisations are now taking advantage of 'end-to-end' methods that support the entire product lifecycle; project and portfolio management (PPM) is one, and can help to collect initial input from customers, prioritise the best product portfolio, build a roadmap, and manage the process of delivering those products to market.
Take Hallmark, the greetings card manufacturer, as an example. The company has 100,000 active stock keeping units (SKUs) sent to 40,000 retailers and has to maintain creativity and innovation whilst also delivering on time for key events in the year.
Three years ago, the company implemented PPM in its product development department, applying the rigour and discipline of its IT operation to create more predictable outcomes in product lifecycle planning and investment. They now identify products with the longest lead times and plan backwards from there, a procedure that gives early warnings about resource bottlenecks that could delay launches.
Since implementation, Hallmark has been able to track more than 1,000 products and resources in the PPM tool and has generated 200 new ideas. The IT department also implemented a new process for customer special requests and this has led to 26 new products.
Hallmark has analytics based on real-time accurate data that support crucial management decisions allowing managers to balance investment in current products with the opportunity to bring new breakthroughs to market.
Cultural change within a company often goes hand-in-hand with the implementation of PPM. Organisations can lack an innovation management framework particularly in relation to people, processes, and tools and in my company's experience, very few are at a ‘mature’ level where innovation is embedded within company culture.
At Planview we use a model to help companies identify and address their level of innovation management maturity, and this assists them to implement change that leads to improved productivity and time to market. It is vital to accept that cultural change, including a shift from ‘tribal knowledge’, will help to realise the full potential of PPM.
There are also enabling tools such as training, sample process maps, agreeing best practice, and assistance with communications strategies that are designed to enhance the process and ensure a positive result.
This is well illustrated by Zumtobel, the Austrian LED lighting specialist. With global markets to satisfy, Zumtobel's need for well-planned project management led to the implementation of PPM to enhance the performance and reliability of its product development department.
The company was all too aware that one of the biggest challenges of the PPM implementation would be change management, so it focused initially on classic project areas so that management could embrace and support its introduction.
PPM is now helping the company to manage more than 200 projects worldwide, all of which are available in project lists and can be represented in high level overviews right down to granular details. This is significantly boosting performance by improving operational planning and execution.
To motivate staff, Zumtobel opted to create a ‘management cockpit’ which would visually focus staff on their core tasks and objectives. This means that they can more effectively plan by accessing and entering essential information directly from separate windows placed on the project overview page.
This kind of flexibility is important in a PPM tool and it may be necessary to work with customers to make modifications that suit their particular needs. Every industry is different, so it is crucial that the tool supports agility – the ability to respond quickly and effectively to changes in the economic climate, regulations and market conditions.
At its core, PPM must help product developers to drive innovation while minimising risk, so it is important to ensure the method is also ‘stage-gate’ ready. What this means is that it provides integrated idea generation, product planning, resource management, financial management and workflows that help to automate and optimise the process from idea to launch.
There are four stages: the product innovation and technology strategy; portfolio management, the idea-to-launch system, and finally climate, culture and leadership for innovation.
Analysts have suggested that whilst portfolio management was traditionally an IT concept, it is increasingly being used in new product development to help companies bring discipline, control and transparency to product lifecycle planning and investment.
It helps that there is now a choice between in-house and in-the-cloud systems and it is important that both are supported. While in-house may suit organisations that want full internal control over their software, the cloud offers advantages for product development-focused companies who don’t want to involve IT or the difficulties inherent with hardware compatibility. Moreover, it can achieve a faster response time because there are no set-up delays.
However they choose to roll it out, product development companies are increasingly seeing PPM as a means of providing visibility across the entire organisation, as well as giving support to the product roadmap, aligning costs and resources against available budgets, enabling better stage gate controls and maximising profitability. What more could you want behind your product development process?
Steve Beaumont is solution marketing manager at Planview