Transforming New Product Development
Craig A. Chambers · Research-Technology Management · 1996
OVERVIEW:Despite general agreement that team product development is the desired path to rapid time-to-market, most organizations have neither the culture nor the infrastructure to support a team-based system. As an alternative to changing the whole company, managers have the more fruitful option of taking achievable steps to change the most important processes and attitudes around them that can make teams work effectively. The author suggests emulating nine consistent behaviors of successful world-class product development firms observed at Battelle. These can be implemented by taking actions in five specific areas: conclurent engineering, roles and organizations, software development, project performance tracking, and change management. For those whose time horizon is barely beyond 24 hours, a six-step initial action recipe is also provided.