World-Class New Product Development

"47 percent of all product development work is repeated, due to upstream changes or late consideration of requirements; a full 51 percent of product development activity consists of fire-fighting, or unplanned activities."

"In seven out of ten failure cases users' needs were not carefully gathered by the development team."

"Electronic communication, as fast and efficient as it has become, does not automatically lead to better communication."

"In a holistic management system, any one part must continuously adjust its actions to accommodate the needs and requirements of the whole."

"Such processes as product development, order fulfillment, and quality became immediate candidates for horizontal management at companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Proctor & Gamble, and Milliken."

"A hierarchical structure will depict the organizational responsibilities and reporting relationships whereas a process structure depicts a dynamic view of how the organization delivers value."

"Treating processes holistically means that much more is being included under the umbrella of product development."

"Any product development activity follows a set of sequential steps."

"The development of new products and services is treated as a company-wide activity involving all of the traditional functions: marketing, sales engineering, purchasing, legal, and finance."

"The four-fields map is a visual representation of the process a team has agreed to follow, often expressed in a plan-do-check-act sequence."

"Results-focused measures offer little motivation to someone down in the trenches working on a product development team and even less to someone lower in the organization."

"Formal design review meetings are held frequently at NEC-NIMS. They last about an hour and 10 to 20 people attend."

"Because so many companies have taken the customer's voice for granted, almost anything they do in this area will be an improvement."

"When it comes to corporate track funding, the R&D activities of many U.S. corporations are characterized by divisive resource allocation debates."

"A methodology known as bottleneck engineering is commonly designed to find the hurdles between stretch goals while meeting cost and time targets."

"When it comes to the product development process, supplier networks translate into early involvement by suppliers in design and manufacturing decisions and longer-term and more predictable relationships with the client company."

"Two main themes emerge from the best practices in rewards and recognitions."

"Knowledge management has surfaced as a vital aspect of any organization's competitive ability, especially in product development."

"Translating goals into meaningful actions for people to take may be one of the most effective change drivers, yet it is rarely well executed."