Stratos

In these difficult economic times ensuring that your product development investment provides real value to the business has never been more important. Your new products are key to keeping existing customers and positioning to gain market share as your competitors struggle. The timely introduction of products that fully meet your customer’s new needs has never been more strategically vital to the success of your business. In this note Stratos offers some ideas to help you meet this challenge.

Validate Voice of the Customer Requirements

Take the time to ensure your customer and product requirements are still aligned. How has the economic turmoil affected your target customer? It may be that the design requirements which were good six months ago have changed dramatically. You need to understand these changes if your firm is going to provide a product that meets your customer’s needs in today’s environment. Moreover, there may be an unidentified opportunity to make a targeted change that will ultimately provide your business with competitive advantage. Go to the field and listen intently to your customers.

Verify Program Resources

Directly ask your project mangers, discipline leads and key team members if they have the resources they need to get the development project done. Realize that your development team’s psyche has changed. Concerns about the economy and job security may be keeping your team from telling you that more or different resources are needed to make the project successful. Management needs to be proactive to ensure that it has fully provided for the projects that will drive new revenues and profits.

Magnify Project Performance

Invest your personal time in closely monitoring the cost and schedule performance of your product development projects. A “hands-off” approach will not result in success in this economy. Now is the time to increase the cadence of your monitoring activity. You must be fully and actively engaged. Management needs to understand when tasks are slipping, special resources need to be applied and key decisions are required to keep the development effort on track.

Rapid Risk Reduction

Fully understand the risks in your development programs. In this economic environment, surprises that delay product introductions and break budgets can dramatically affect business results and the customer’s perception of your company’s ability to perform. Today’s business climate demands development predictability. Use fault trees, FMEA, external expertise and targeted risk reduction techniques like bread-boarding, rapid prototyping, performance testing and simulation to understand and mitigate risk early in your development projects.

Protect the Promising

Throw a resource lifeline to those key long-term projects that merit protection. With declining budgets and the need to focus remaining capital near term, there would seem to be no place in a development portfolio for the promising but early-stage project. Think about how you can creatively keep the very best of these projects alive. Leveraging your internal human resources through partnering, outsourcing and small, thoughtful, investments of cash can stage these projects for full development efforts in the future.

In these difficult economic times ensuring that your product development investment provides real value to the business has never been more important.