Your Product Development Process Demands Ongoing Improvement

Winners at new product development make every project a learning process. Here are 12 steps to reaching that level. OVERVIEW: Although managers routinely review their product development projects to ensure that each is achieving its objectives, they seldom review the development process itself to identify and overcome its shortcomings. This article provides a I2-step process for capturing the learning from each project. The first step is selecting a name for the process that is preferably not the popular one, "postmortem. " The last and most crucial step is converting the findings from each project into actual changes in the development process. This amounts to giving process change actions the same level of attention that development projects receive. Nine companies provide illustrations of the principles involved, showing that a welltuned development process is a competitive advantage that repays the investment required to obtain it. Most firms today have an established process for developing new products. However, managers typically view the development process as a business system that must be in place to ensure the quality of their products and control the use of resources, rather than viewing it as a competitive strength. Thus, they are unwilling to invest in continually sharpening the process to provide a competitive edge as the environment shifts. In my experience working with many different companies to accelerate or otherwise improve how they develop new products, I have found that each firm can be put into one of four levels of product development maturity, depending on the attention management pays to its development process: 1. An ad hoc process. 2. An established process that is used on most or all projects but is not reviewed itself. 3. Some projects are reviewed to learn about the process, but there is no effective, ongoing way of using the review to improve the process. 4. Each project is viewed as a learning experience, and formal channels exist for modifying the process as a result of this learning. Many companies have moved from the first stage to the second; fewer have advanced to the third stage, and very few have reached the powerful fourth stage. This article presents a 12-step process for helping companies reach these higher levels of maturity, in which product development is regarded as a continuously adaptive process that learns from all past projects. The mindset underlying the higher levels of maturity is that each development project has two deliverables: 1) The product that goes to market; 2) Improvements in the organization's development process. Any project that only produces an excellent product on time and within budget has only obtained half of the benefit. Leading companies invest in obtaining the second half. Laying the Foundation 1. Name your improvement process carefully. -This first step is where many companies get off to a poor start. The most popular name is "postmortem," which suggests that something has died. Some companies place a lively twist on this situation by calling their process a postpartum. Then there is the choice between "review" and "audit. " Audit is an acceptable term in many companies, but it connotes unpleasant management heavy-handedness in others. The point is not that some terms are good and others are bad but that we should be particularly careful about the signals we send here, because any process that reviews project performance will get very close to evaluating individual performance too. Individuals will be unwilling to help the company improve if they suspect that their own career is at stake. Senco Products (a Cincinnati, Ohio manufacturer of pneumatically powered hand tools) calls theirs a "process improvement review. " Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, California) uses "retrospective analysis," and Farinon Division of Harris Corporation (a supplier of microwave products and systems in San Carlos, California) calls it "lessons learned. …