By David Stokes, New Product Development and Innovation Professional

Hi again

Today I’m going to talk about product development process, ie: the process of taking an idea and deliver the resulting product to the market.

You might recall in my first blog (http://pdma-nz.org/news___blog?blogm=view&blogid=324), I mentioned that the we put in place a basic stage-gate framework, but started by slotting in what the project teams were already doing into the appropriate stage. The other thing we also did was to initiate the project with a Charter.

So the next step was to start fleshing out the detail of what activities need to be conducted in each of the stages and what information needed to be collected to support the decisions made at each of the gates.

So let’s look at each of the stages in turn. I’ll use the stage and gate names we standardised to in Navman, but you can use whatever names you feel is appropriate for your organisation and the industry you are in. The first thing to note is that we referred to stages as phases – it doesn’t matter necessarily which term you use, but make sure it is used consistently to ensure that there isn’t any confusion.

Phase 1 – Program Definition

Objectives of the phase:
The objectives for the first phase is to do a first-cut on the project, ie: what are the requirements for the product, what is going to be involved in developing that product and does the business case look like it will stack up?

Key Activities/Deliverables:
If you don’t already have a project charter, this is the first thing you should focus on is getting it approved as it gets everyone on the same page. Then you start working with the project team to start defining the customer, market, and known product requirements, plan for the project and a first cut of the business case.

Gate 1
This is the first opportunity to review the project and determine, based on the first-cut of the information gathered in the first phase, whether the project is likely to be successful – can we develop a product that will meet the customer requirements and be profitable for the company? If not, kill the project now and allow another project to come along so we can find the projects that are most likely going to be the winners!

Phase 2 – Concept Development and Selection

Objectives of the phase:
Taking the information gathered in the first phase, doing the next level of detail, both with the business case as well as the detailed plan to deliver the product. Also, as the phase name suggests, coming up with a number of concepts and approaches on what the product could be and selecting the preferred concept to go with.

Key Activities/Deliverables:
Business Case – financial and resource requirements against the returns we can expect from delivering the product to market.
Detailed plan

Gate 2
This is probably the most important gate – imagine there there is a big green button and by pushing the green button, the organisation will commit serious financial and resources to developing the product. So you’d better be sure it’s a good decision! Again, probably the best decision might be killing the project if the business case just doesn’t stack up or there is too much risk. So the project teams need to have done sufficient due diligence (which your process should guide them) so that good quality information is provided to the decision makers.

Phase 3 – Design / Design Validation

Objective of the phase:
Off we go now and execute the plan from phase 2, completing and validating the design for the product.

Key Activities/Deliverables:
Market Roll-out Plan and detailed engineering and analysis for the product systems, sub-systems, and components required to transform the product concept, developed and approved in Phase 2, into a stable design.
The product design is then validated through components and sub-systems and ultimately through the Design Validation build and product validation. A Design Validation review confirms that the design has been validated to all requirements and ensures that the production and supply chain processes are prepared to support production validation.

Gate 3
Has the project gone to plan, have the critical issues identified during this stage been addressed satisfactorily and are we ready to validate the product process in the next stage?

Phase 4 – Process Validation and Production Readiness

Objective of the phase:
The objectives for this phase is to validate the production process and to ensure that the marketing / sales channels and the supply chain are prepared for initiation of full-scale production in Phase 5

Key Activities/Deliverables:
Manufacturing plan and procedures

Gate 4
This is yet another critical decision making point – at this point we know what we are able to deliver to the market.
Now no product is perfect ..... so based on the known issues, should we push the green button and proceed to commence manufacturing and launch the product? Are there technical issues that could come back and bite us in the bum? Are we confident that the product won’t be a flop on the market and possibly damage our brand? This is the last opportunity to push the red button (or maybe an orange button to say we delay the launch so that we can sort out the critical issues).......

Phase 5 – Product Launch

Objective of the phase:
Again, as the name suggests, the product is launched. This should be simply the execution the plans developed in the previous stages, ie: manufacturing plan, launch plan, etc. The product development project comes to a close.

Key Activities/Deliverables:
This phase is where the manufacturing plans and procedures developed in Phase 4 are executed, product production is started, the product is launched to the marketplace and products delivered to the customers. There should be a smooth transition of the product to operations and ongoing lifecycle management. Also, as no doubt there were lots of lessons learned throughout the project, the project team should put together a list of lessons learned and recommendations for improvements to the process. The project team is disbanded. However, some of the resources might be transferred, at least temporarily, to the operation side of the business to provide product support or address issues.

Post Phase 5 - Product Lifecycle Management

You might also want to include a couple more phases to the end of the project as the product goes through its lifecycle from launch to obsolescence (who out there has problems obsolescing products that should have been stopped years ago?). Also, it gives you an opportunity to validate the estimates given in the business case when the project was given the green light at the end of the second phase, eg: volume, revenue, margin, etc. Remember, these estimates form a critical part of the business case, so you want to make sure they are in the same ‘ballpark’. If they aren’t, then you should revisit the assumptions that were made and work out where you went wrong. This will help the next time you do a business case for a project, hopefully making it more realistic!

As you can imagine, there's a whole heap more detail that goes behind this, but hopefully gets you in the right direction.  If you've got any questions, click on the Comments link below or email me on david.stokes@pdma-nz.org