Product Development Process and Organization
Chapter 2 – Product development process and organization
A well designed development process is useful for the following reasons
Quality assurance – by having a specific plan with phases, we know that the quality of the resulting product will be good
Coordination – helps to define roles of each player
Planning – timing helps to anchor the schedule
Management – a manager can help to identify problem areas
Improvement – review helps to improve future processes
6 phases of the generic development process are
Planning, concept development, system level design, detail design
Testing and refinement
Alpha prototypes – production intent parts, same geometry and material properties as intended but not necessarily fabricated with the actual processes to be used in production
Used to test whether the product will work as designed and whether the product satisfies key customer needs
Beta prototypes – parts supplied by the intended production processes but may not be assembled using the intended final assembly
Extensively evaluated internally and tested by customers in their own use environment
Goal is to answer questions about performance and reliability to identify necessary engineering changes for the final product
Production ramp up
Concept development: front end process – Generally contains many interrelated activities
Identifying customer needs, establishing target specifications, concept selection, concept testing, setting final specifications, project planning, economic analysis, benchmarking of competitive products
Product development organizations
Organizations are formed by establishing links among individuals
Reporting relationships
Financial arrangements
Physical layout
Organizational links may be aligned with functions/projects/both
Matrix organization – hybrid of project and functional
Heavyweight project organization
Strong project links, project manager has authority, functional manager has little control
Lightweight project organization
Strong functional links, project manager = coordinator + administrator who updates schedules, arranges meetings, and facilitates coordination, functional managers are responsible for budgets, performance evaluation, etc
Chapter 3 – Opportunity identification
Horizon 1 – largely improvements, extensions, variants, and cost reductions of existing products for existing markets, relatively low risk, iphone 11, built on existing technology
Horizon 2 – less known territory in one or both of the dimensions of the market or the technology – xbox, new territory for microsoft
Horizon 3 – attempts to exploit opportunities that are in some way new to the world, embodying the highest level of uncertainty-iphone 1
Goals of opportunity ID process and product development process = diff
Opportunity identification – goal = generate a large number of opportunities and efficiently kill those that are not worthy of future investment
Product development – goal = take the opportunity and do everything possible to make it the best product it can be
Effective opportunity tournaments
Generate a large number of opportunities
Seek high quality of the opportunities generated
Create high variance in the quality of opportunities
Opportunity identification process
Establish a charter – “create a physical product in the cat toy category that we can launch to the market within about a year through our existing retail sales channel”
Generate and sense many opportunities
Resources – valuable, rare, inimitable, non substitutional
Study customers
Consider implications of trends
Imitate, but better
De-commoditize a commodity
Drive an innovation “down market”
Mine your sources
Screen opportunities
Develop promising opportunities
Select exceptional opportunities
Real-Win-Worth-It (RWW)
Is the opportunity real? Can you win with it? It is worth it financially?
Reflect on the results and process
Chapter 4 – Product Planning
Four types of product development projects – new product platforms, derivatives of existing platforms, incremental improvements, fundamentally new products
Five step product plan – identify opportunities, evaluate and prioritize projects, allocate resources and plan timing, complete pre-project planning, reflect on the results and the process
Step 2: evaluate and prioritize projects
Competitive strategy
Technology leadership
Cost leadership
Customer focus
Initiative
Market segmentation
Technological trajectories
Technology curve
Product platform planning
Technology roadmapping
Evaluating fundamentally new product opportunities
Balancing the portfolio
Product process change matrix – plots portfolio of projects along two specific dimensions: the extent to which the project involves a change in production processes
Step 3: Allocate resources and plan timing
Plan for capacity utilization around 80-90% so there are sufficient resources to stay on track
Step 4: Complete pre-project planning
Mission statements
brief description of the product
benefit proposition
key business goals
Target markets for the product
Assumptions and constraints
Stakeholders
Chapter 5 – identifying customer needs
Needs are largely independent of any particular product
Specifications do depend on the product
Latent needs = not recognized + new
Process of identifying customer needs
Gather raw data from customers
Interviews
Focus groups
Observing the product in use
Lead users – customers who experience needs early
Extreme users- those who use the product in unusual ways
Data template example
Question: typical uses
Customer statement – i have to manually turn it on and off when it gets too hot or cold
Interpreted need – the thermostat maintains a comfortable temperature without requiring user action
Interpret the raw data in terms of customer needs
Express the need in terms of what the product has to do, not in terms of how it might
Use positive, not negative, phrasing
Express the need as an attribute of the product
Avoid the words must and should
Organize needs into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs – primary = most general, secondary = more detail
Write down the needs and group them
Establish the relative importance of the needs
Chapter 6 – Product Specifications
Product specifications are the precise description of what the product has to do
Specification consists of a metric and a value, “Average time to assemble” is a metric, “less than 75 seconds” is a value
Process of establishing the target specifications – prepare list of metrics, collect competitive benchmarking info, set ideal and marginally acceptable target values, reflect
Prepare list of metrics
Needs-metric matrix
Rows = customer needs, columns = metrics
A mark means that the need and the metric are related
Metrics should be dependent variables
Collect competitive benchmarking information
Use metrics of competition
Set ideal and marginally acceptable target values
Marginally acceptable = value that would just barely work
At least X – brake mounting stiffness
At most X – mass of suspension fork
Between X and Y – value for spring preload
Exactly X – rake offset metric
A set of discrete values
Setting the final specifications
Develop technical models of the product
Develop a cost model of the product
Refine the specifications, making trade-offs where necessary
Competitive map – scatter plot of the competitive products along two dimensions selected from the set of metrics – sometimes called a trade off map
Useful in showing that all of the high performance suspensions have high estimated manufacturing costs
Can be constructed directly from the data contained in the competitive benchmarking chart
Conjoint analysis – uses computer survey data to construct a model of customer preference
Using customer responses, can predict which product a customer would choose
Flow down the specifications as appropriate
Specifications must be created for every subsystem of the product
Must make sure subsystem specifications match product specifications- one isn’t too hard to achieve
Chapter 19 – project management
Sequential tasks – must be completed in a certain order
Parallel tasks – dependent on the same tasks but independent of each other
Coupled tasks – mutually dependent
Design structure matrix
Mark dependencies by placing X marks in its row to indicate what other tasks in the columns it depends on
Gantt Chart
Horizontal lines represent the start and end of each task along the line
Doesn’t explicitly display dependencies among tasks
Parallel tasks can be overlapped in time for convenience because they don’t depend on each other
Sequential tasks might be overlapped, depending on the exact nature of the info dependency
Coupled tasks must be overlapped in time because they need to be addressed simultaneously
PERT Charts- program evaluation and review technique
Read from left to right
Coupled tasks are grouped together into one rolled up task
Critical path is the longest chain of dependent events
Critical path is important because any delays in the critical task result in an increase in project duration, all the other paths contain slack
Baseline project planning
Contract book
Project task list – time to complete task estimated in person-hours, person-days, person-months etc
Team staffing and organization
Determinants of speed:
Members volunteer to work on the team
Members are assigned to the team full time
Members are on the team the whole time
Members report directly to the team leader
The key functions, including at least marketing design, manufacturing, and product management are on the team
Project schedule adds expected timing to the project task list
Steps to create a baseline project schedule
Use the DSM or PERT chart to identify the dependencies among tasks
Position the key project milestones along a timeline in a Gantt chart
Schedule the tasks, considering project staffing
Adjust the timing of the milestones to be consistent with the time required for the tasks
Accelerating projects
Manage the project scope
Facilitate the exchange of essential information
Complete individual tasks on the critical path more quickly
Move tasks off the critical path
Eliminate some critical tasks entirely
Aggregate safety times
Eliminate waiting delays for critical path resources
Overlap selected critical tasks
Pipeline large tasks – break large tasks into smaller ones so results can be passed as soon as they are finished
Outsource some tasks
Perform iterations quickly
Decouple tasks to avoid iterations
Consider sets of solutions
DSM can be used to represent dependencies, gantt charts are used to represent timing of tasks, pert charts represent both dependencies and timing and are frequently used to compute the critical path
Chapter 7 – Concept Generation
Common dysfunctions
Consideration of only one or two ideas pitched by the most assertive
Failure to consider the usefulness of concepts employed by other firms
Involvement of only one or two people
Ineffective integration of promising partial solutions
Failure to consider entire categories of solutions
Concept generation method
Clarify the problem – decompose into simpler subproblems
Search externally – gather info from lead users, experts, patents, etc
Search internally (simultaneous with ^) – use individual and group methods to retrieve and adapt knowledge of the team
Explore systematically – use classification trees and combination tables to organize thinking of the team and to synthesize solution fragments
Reflect on the solutions and process
Problem decomposition – dividing a problem into simpler subproblems
Functional decomposition
First step is to represent it as a single black box operating on material, energy, and signal flows
Thin solid lines denote transfer and conversion of energy, thick solid lines signify the movement of material within the system, and dashed lines represent the flows of control and feedback symbols within the system
Techniques for getting started
Create function diagram of existing product
Follow one of the flows (ex material) and determine what operations are required
Decomposition by sequence of user actions – useful for products with simple technical functions with lots of user interaction
Decomposition by key customer needs – useful for products in which form is the primary problem – ex toothbrushes, storage containers
Searching externally
Ways to gather information from external sources – lead user interviews, expert consultation, patent searches, literature searches, and competitive benchmarking
Benchmarking is the study of existing products with functionality similar to that of the product under development
Internal search
Generate a lot of ideas
Welcome ideas that may seem infeasible
Make plenty of sketches
Build sketch models
Hints for generating concept solutions
Make analogies
Wish and wonder
Distort ideas – SCAMPER method – substitute, combine, adapt, modify/magnify/minimize, put to other uses, eliminate, and reverse/rearrange
Use related and unrelated stimuli – related = other people’s ideas, unrelated = synectics, to look at a collection of photographs and relate to the product
Set quantitative goals
Use the gallery method
Explore systematically
Concept classification tree – helps divide the possible solutions into independent categories
Benefits – pruning of less-promising branches, identification of independent approaches in the problem, exposure of inappropriate emphasis on certain branches, refinement of the problem decomposition for a particular branch
Concept combination table – helps to selectively consider combinations of fragments
Pair a solution for each subproblem up with another solution from another subproblem
Should be focused around coupled subproblems (solutions can be evaluated only in combination with the solutions to other subproblems
Chapter 8 – Concept Selection
Identify customer needs
Concept Selection methods
External decision – customer, or client makes decision
Product champion – an influential member of the team chooses
Intuition – chosen by feel, just feels better
Multivoting – each team member votes for different concepts
Online survey, Pros and cons, Prototype and test, Decision matrices
A structured concept selection process helps to maintain objectivity throughout the concept phase. Other benefits are:
Customer focused product
Competitive design
Better product process coordination
Reduced time to product introduction
Effective group decision making
Documentation of the decision process
Methodology – concept screening and concept scoring
Screening is quick, approximate evaluation
Scoring is a more careful analysis
Both stages follow a 6 step process that leads the team through the concept selection activity
Prepare the selection matrix, rate the concepts, rank the concepts, combine and improve, select one or more concepts, reflect
Matrices help to focus attention on customer needs
Concept screening
Pugh concept selection – purpose is to narrow the number of concepts
Uses a reference concept to evaluate concept variants against selection criteria
Uses a coarse comparison system to narrow the range of concepts under consideration
Concept scoring
More complex
The team weighs the relative importance of the selection criteria and focuses on more refined comparisons with respect to each criterion
May use different reference points for each criterion
Uses weighted selection criteria and a finer rating scale
Caveats/warnings
Decomposition of concept quality, subjective criteria, to facilitate improvement of concepts, where to include cost, selecting elements of aggregate concepts, applying concept selection throughout the development process
Patents and Intellectual Property
Trademark
Protects a company or product name or logo from being used by others
™ can be used on any logo or company name without registration
Registered trademark Ⓡ registered with government agency, legal protection in lawsuit, valid for as long as its used
Copyright
Protects original work after registration, lasts 50-100 years after owner dies
Written word like books, journal articles, scientific reports, websites
Also includes graphics, art, pictures, music, and software
Copyright can be transferred
Original owner can use copyrighted material even if copyright has been transferred
Trade secret
Secret company does not want to share
Can be a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, patter, commercial method, compilation of information
Ex coca cola recipe
Patent
Protects an invention or product for 20 years from date of filing
Requires a complete description of invention or product
Utility patent requirements
Invention and product must be useful to someone in some context
Has to be novel and non-existing in any form
Non-obvious to someone in that trade
Can’t combine existing products or inventions to patent a new product
Exceptions
Drugs can be patented for 20 years but not give exclusive rights for that long
Exclusive rights to the inventor .5-7 years after the FDA approval
Steps to prepare a patent application
Formulate a strategy and plan
Study prior inventions
Outline claims
Write the description of the invention
Refine claims
Pursue application
Reflect on results and process