New Product Development Transformation Consulting

In our client engagements, we work directly with program sponsors, business leads and technical leads to understand the current state and future direction, develop transformation strategy, transfer knowledge and skills, challenge assumptions and share our experiences working with world-class product development organizations. You benefit from a transformation strategy that leverages our experience to deliver results more quickly, a much shorter learning curve on new skills and laser-sharp focus on results.

We employ a wide variety of tools taken from our years of direct experience delivering products and improving product development team performance. We also draw from Lean Product Development research, organizational change management tools and NPD best practices. We don't have a one-toolkit-fits-all approach. The methods we use in any engagement will depend upon the organization's product strategy, technology, process maturity, size, geographic distribution and value proposition.

We have worked with companies in a variety of industries, from small, entrepreneurial teams to Fortune 50 companies. All of our select clients share a passion for delivering new products that deliver exceptional customer value, create market leadership and generate high returns.

We consult primarily with these types of companies:

• R&D-driven companies in industries like high tech and alternative energy where technology advances drive the need for low cost agility.
• Pharmaceutical and medical products companies that must balance speed with quality and safety in a regulated environment.
• Established companies in mature industries whose product development processes take too long and cost too much.
• Companies navigating the transition from start-up to sustainable growth.
• Entrepreneurial companies who want to go rapidly from idea to marketable product.

The Engagement Process

When you contact us to learn more about how we can help you, we will first talk with you about your needs and goals for product development performance improvements. We will work with you to define measurable goals for the business value the project will deliver. Once the goals are defined, we will develop a proposal outlining the specific things that we will do to help you achieve your objectives.

Product Development-Focused Business Objectives

The types of objectives that we set with our clients include such things as:

• Faster time to market and better schedule predictability
  • Lower overall development time for a critical new product.
  • Reduce the number of unnecessary design loopbacks in product development.
  • Decrease the amount of time it takes to transition a new product into manufacturing.
• Lower development costs and increase development capacity
  • Deliver six new products in the next cycle with the same resources it took to deliver four this time.
  • Manage increasing design complexity with the same number of resources.
  • Reduce tooling costs driven by unnecessary rework.
• Lower product costs and improve product quality
  • Reduce product cost for the new generation of products over current estimates.
  • Reduce the number of post-production defects and ECOs.
  • Reduce the number of installation-related support calls.

Consulting Services Examples

Here are some examples of the types of services we have provided to support business objectives:

• Current state assessments and future state development
  • Interviews with team members
  • Group retrospectives reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of past product development programs.
  • Value stream mapping at either the framework or the micro-process level. For more information on this, please see my article "Effective Value Stream Mapping in Product Development."
  • Recommendations for specific actions to drive rapid performance improvements.
• Product development transformation support
  • Organizational structure designs to maximize effectiveness
  • Strategies to align the organization and the environment around new expectations
  • Change management and communication plans
• Targeted Assistance with Product Development Leadership
  • 360° assessments of product development leaders
  • Job descriptions and performance measures
  • Interviewing strategies and vetting new hires
• Basic skills and knowledge transfer
  • Design workshops to set up visual planning systems and develop knowledge capture and retrieval strategies.
  • Workshops on the basics of effective product development.
  • Train-the-trainer and licensed workshop materials to develop internal expertise and spread the skills more rapidly.
  • Customized training events and simulations.