Does anyone have any experience with implementing the formal Stage-Gate process for new product development? The Navigator tool seems to be a good starting place, just looking for a little feedback. Scott Saving Changes...
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John SchlichterFounder| OPM Experts LLC http://opmexperts.comAtlanta, Ga, United States
Yes, I have implemented such a process for several clients. What do you want to know?
Typically the product development process is decomposed into major activities to achieve specific objectives by phase (or stage), culminating in the end goal. Typical product development activities are widely known, yet each company's product development process will be unique to the organization's structure and to the special kind(s) of products being created.
Separate from the product development processes are the project management processes. The latter are used to manage the former. These two kinds of processes are distinct, yet they interact in specific ways. Most companies fail to make the distinction, resulting in poor treatment of the project management processes and all of the negative consequences this implies.
Product development is usually a cross-functional effort. Thus an initiative to define the product development process should be cross-functional too. Fortunately, project management standards that can be integrated with your unique product development processes already exist and are applicable to most projects most of the time. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. You need good facilitation to harness the experience of practitioners (usually within your own company) to design your product development processes, and you need subject matter expertise (often from outside one's own organization) to explain the interaction of project management with product development and to help you integrate the two.
Once you have determined how to decompose your product development process, it is easy to develop checklists that may be used at each stage of product development in order to determine whether or not to proceed to the next stage. Project management checklists can (and should) be used in conjunction, although it is important not to use such checklists as a substitute for project control. Application of both product development and project management checklists should occur in concert, but the two types and the processes for applying both types should be distinct. This begs questions about governance within your organization, i.e. who makes the decisions and how, who is responsible for the stage-gate decisions, how different organizational entities work together effectively given your competitive environment and strategic priorities, etc.
Once you have designed the processes that underpin a stage-gate approach, you must train personnel. Such training should not be off-the-shelf. It should reflect your organization's own way of doing things. Moreover, the training approach should incorporate interactive exercises and real examples in order to simulate realistic situations that trainees will encounter. This makes the results of training last, while allowing your organization to address during "training time" the real issues it faces on its current or next product development projects.
My firm has done everything I have talked about here. It works.
John, Thanks for the reply. You succinctly described the process we are going through right now. At the very least, you have validated much of the work we have done over the past few months. Thank you for that.
Now that I have your ear, I'll be more specific. The one piece of implementation that I haven't found much information on is data management. Now for IT groups, I expect this is second nature, but for a manufacturing outfit the answers aren't as obvious. Traditionally we have used both paper and electronic files; lab notebooks, project notebooks with meeting minutes, design drawings, test results, etc. have been archived as hard copies while emails, financial data, progress reports etc. have typically been stored electronically. Now, with the Stage-Gate process we find that we need a repository for Idea Submission Forms and Gate Scorecards as well as all of the traditional documentation (project plan, business plan and on and on). So, what started out as a project to enhance our product development process has turned into something much bigger. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. I know that once we launch the Stage-Gate process, I'll start to find the deficiencies in our data management, but I'd like to be a little more proactive than reactive. Scott Saving Changes...
John SchlichterFounder| OPM Experts LLC http://opmexperts.comAtlanta, Ga, United States
Our number has changed to 404.252.4299. For more on this topic, visit http://www.opmexperts.com/mb Saving Changes...
