Product Development Advantage Group

Publications

No Regrets Leadership - 12 Habits to be More Successful
This brief paper lists 12 habits of successful leaders who manage to lead successfully despite the pressures of little time and the constant flow of urgent things to deal with. (1 page)

Stop Rolling the Dice by Starting to Proactively Manage Your Risks
This paper discusses 4 complementary principles of proactive risk management. If you currently manage product development project risks in an ad hoc manner, starting to apply these principles will enable you to shorten your time to market by having fewer late suprises. (3 pages)

What Product Development Style is Right for You?
There are three fundamental organizating principles you may want to consider in any product development project with multi-disciplinary complexity. For any given project, do you count primarily on the project's Management ("M"), your Processes ("P"), or the power of your Team ("T") to make sure you generate the best potential result? Read on to help understand whether a style shift can help you with your project execution. (2 pages)

Making Your "Product Development Factory" Lean
Manufacturing products in a repeatable way and developing innovative products are sufficiently different that blindly applying lean manufacturing principles to a product development environment will not improve your business, it will probably do just the opposite. On the other hand, lean is about adding value and removing waste. Both are very rational and positive goals for product development. This article helps to bridge those perspectives. (2 pages)

7 Steps to Improve R&D Throughput... by Working on Fewer Projects
This article makes the case for a different way to go about maximizing the throughput in R&D by addressing the biggest contributor in many organization to missing commitments - resources are overcommited. A seven step process is outlined for avoiding this problem and maximizing the business leverage of R&D. (4 pages)

Competitive Advantage through Internal Leverage - Learn to Get Horizontal Work Done
This article focuses on a source of frustration in many organizations who sense they should get better leverage from the work done internally but can't get their different departments to work together in a coordinated or collaborative way. In a highly competitive world, having the organizational capability to better leverage the efforts of your internal groups can provide you with a strong advantage by providing for an economical, efficient and effective means of getting things done. Understanding how to get "horizontal" work done in the inherently "vertical" world of an organization is vital to success. (7 pages)

Three Perspectives on Transparency - A Key to Making Your Business Engine Fly
This article addresses a key building block for organizations that need to move quickly, the norms of transparency. It discusses transparency downward, upward and sideways as important ingredients to lubricate your business engine so it operates efficiently and effectively, even at top speed. (3 pages)

Key Success Factors for Geographically Dispersed Product Development Teams
This article summarizes the key factors given by a dozen product development leaders from across the globe along with a checklist of considerations you may want to think about either to optimize your current developments or to consider before you embark on your next one. (3 pages)

It's Not Your Process - It's Your System
This article makes the case that while process improvement is important, it is not the only key to improving your development capability. The system in place at Dell's Product Group is used as an example to demonstrate that many factors outside of your process play a very critical role. What is important is that the process and the rest of the system work optimally. The concept of the whole system is introduced. (3 pages)

Is That Seismic Shift Your Schedule Slipping?
For those who have already covered the basics of planning and execution with a cross-functional development process but still see schedules moving out, this article highlights 13 areas from the portfolio to project level where improvements can relieve some of the pressures that drive project schedule slippage (6 pages). If you would like a one page summary of the 13 points you can click here.

Strategic Agility Quiz
Downloading this PDF and answering its 16 questions may give you a quick sense for whether there is a little opportunity or a lot to become more Strategically Agile. The questions were derived from some key attributes that many Strategically Agile firms have in common. (2 pages)

Strategic Agility Overview
This short overview presentation describes why it is important today, defines it, and lists prevalent practices which kill it in most organizations. (8 pages)

WARNING: ANNUAL PLANNING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT HEALTH
This article published by the Management Roundtable discusses the challenges that 'big bang' annual planning can create for product development and offers 7 ideas to help mitigate those challenges and at the same time improve your business. (5 pages)

The Synergy Challenge - 10 Key Acquisition Lessons Learned
This article was published by Management Roundtable in January, 2007. In it, Bob Becker outlines what went right and what went wrong with a key acquisition. Some of the key mistakes were well-intentioned choices to limit downside - but in doing so, guaranteed the business potential would never be realized. (5 pages)

Rethinking the Stage-Gate Process - A Reply to the Critics
This article was published by Management Roundtable in 2006. In it, Bob Becker responds to recent criticisms of the Stage-Gate® process arguing that Stage-Gate remains a useful model with business checkpoints when implemented with process flexibility. (5 pages)

Recordings

Product Development Organizations

Management Roundtable (MRT) - A practioner's resource for product and technology development. Their FastTrack research and knowledge exchange can be quite a valuable resource.

Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) - A well established organization whose mission is 'to improve the effectness of individuals and organizations in product development and management'.

Book Recommendations

Click to find on Amazon...

In today's turbulent markets, innovation and agility are closely linked. Markets shift, requirements change, technology relentlessly creates new opportunities while annihilating others. If you are building complex products, the cost of failure is high if you have to guess exactly right before you execute on your product development efforts. This is one reason why most product development portfolios are dominated by incremental changes to existing products rather than focused on creating new innovations.

Preston Smith, in his latest book - "Flexible Product Development - Building Agility for Changing Markets", addresses many of these factors by prescribing a different approach to try to bring more innovative products back into the portfolio. Smith delivers both tools and strategies for dealing with the dilemma of having to guess right at the beginning. He eliminates that dilemma by suggesting strategies for maintaining flexibility beyond the initial planning - which is at odds with the oft cited bogeyman of product development failures - the inability to nail down requirements at the beginning. He cites the principles from agile software development as a model that he credibly extends to other types of products.

For many product development organizations, this will seem like heresy. Have an open mind because by applying some of the tools and strategies in a systemic way, you may find that there are smarter ways to architect, plan, and execute your development efforts which not only provide you with flexibility later than you had envisioned but in doing so allow you to better respond to fast shifting markets, technologies, and specific customer requirements.

Smith largely delivers on a practical level by offering a view of many parts of a flexible product development system including architecture, guiding principles, processes, risk management, decision making, team dynamics, product management, and change management. To be clear, this field is still emerging. There are aspects of some development efforts where the agile software analogy is tough to pull off but those details miss the larger point. At a philosophical level, once you start to think about the benefits that flexibility could bring to your competitiveness you may be compelled to build on this work to bring these concepts alive in a relevant way in your product development system.

Click to find on Amazon...

The model is not just an academic alternative to other popular team stage concepts (like Bruce Tuckman's "Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing"), rather Lencioni delivers, by way of an illustrative fable, an approach to navigating through the five dysfunctions to get to a high level of performance. The story involves a newly-hired CEO of an early stage company with business challenges and a dysfunctional team. Kathryn is dynamite as she proceeds to mold this company's leadership into a team. This fictitious case has its share of realistic messiness, illustrates how a leader can drive change, and gives the reader a good sense of how much energy must to go into an effort like this. A high performance team is an investment and not one to be made in situations where a "group" will do just fine. After the fable, there is a very good summary with some analysis and implementation suggestions.

While this book by itself won't transform your organization, it may provide you with the insight you need to recognize where your teams are in their evolution to help you start to drive to a higher level of performance. When I was running the engineering and operations shop at Mercury Computer Systems, we created a very effective product development team formation program based on this content. We stopped mistaking groups that happened to meet often for teams and from this framework we actually realized a great opportunity to improve our product development performance.

The author sums things up very well in the very first paragraph of the introduction: "Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."

Click to find on Amazon...

You may wonder why focus on a CEO book here. The reason is simple. It's not a CEO book. It's a leadership book that stresses the importance of strong communications skills to lead effectively. People in product development should recognize the potential value in the book's subtitle: "Secrets for Commanding Attention and Getting Results". Success isn't just about the quality of your ideas, it's about communicating them so they can be acted upon.

She's taken skills acquired through a diverse career including years as a top-rated Boston TV news anchor and translated them into a convincing, practical, and often insightful set of ideas and tools that leaders and aspiring leaders should find very helpful. The book's content isn't academic, it's what has been proven to work in her experience as an executive coach. From getting comfortable in high visibility situations to finding the right leadership voice to bring your people along through changes, Bates provides a how-to guide for developing the communication skills to be sure your message is authentic, understood and has impact. While many of us may choose to skip the 20% of the content that won't help day to day (like handling the media) the other 80% is well worth an investment of your time to become a much more effective leader.

Click to find on Amazon...

For those of you involved with running a firm who are concerned with how different activities impact its overall performance and value, this is a must read. Jack Alexander draws on his CFO and teaching experience to bring us the Value Performance Framework which is a very understandable model of the corporate system as it exists to create value.