7 Keys to Avoiding the Traps that Annual Planning Sets for Product Development

WARNING: Annual Planning May Be Hazardous to Your Product Development Health

There is a fundamental conflict between typical annual fiscal year planning and product development planning. The best product development environment has a continuous flow of products moving through the pipeline with a mix appropriate to meet both sales targets and longer-term strategy objectives. “Big-bang” annual planning tends to hinder that continuous flow.

In addition to corporate strategy, the product development portfolio should be driven by customer needs, market opportunities, resource availability, and new technological capabilities -- most of which do not operate on a fiscal year schedule.

This session, led by product development expert Bob Becker, will describe 7 symptoms of dysfunction often associated with annual planning and offer 7 approaches that your organization can take to reconcile fiscal years with the many benefits of continuously generating, vetting and then driving the best product development efforts forward.

By participating, you will receive specific techniques to help your organization eliminate these problems and improve the management of your business.

This session will:

• Discuss what creates the conflicts between financial driven annual planning and product development

• Help you recognize the symptoms of this conflict and determine how important it is for your organization to address

• Offer different steps your organization can take to mitigate issues and become more effective and efficient at business planning

• Provide action steps to get started

Learn to transform “big bang” annual planning into more meaningful and timely updates that extend your visibility, match the detail to what makes sense, and leave you with an achievable development portfolio.

This audio session will be a 90-minute presentation with frequent opportunities for questions & answers and includes:

• Hardcopy of presentation slides sent to your office prior to session

• Your questions answered by an expert

Invite your whole team to join you - the fee is the same as long as you are on one line, just put it on speakerphone!

Can't make the time and date of the call? Join FastTrack and receive the transcript and download the mp3 of this and other audio sessions.

Bob Becker
Managing Director
Product Development Advantage Group LLC

Bob Becker is the Owner and Managing Director of the Product Development Advantage Group, LLC. As a product development leader, he has 24 years of experience helping companies in a variety of industries create winning products by developing the innovation and execution process capability coupled with building the teams to deliver.

Prior to founding this firm, Bob was the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations for Mercury Computer Systems, the world's leading developer of high performance embedded multi-computers. He has been the Vice President of Engineering at industry leaders MicroTouch Systems and PictureTel Corporation. He has nine US Patents to his credit where he has developed products with many technologies including microprocessors, ASICs, FPGAs, systems on chip, IP cores, mixed signal, DSPs, PCBs, systems, operating systems, multimedia, development tools, user interfaces, algorithms, and manufacturing processes.

With more than 15 years of leadership experience and a background that extends beyond engineering to product management, program management, customer support, manufacturing, supply chain management and corporate quality functions, Bob has a business breadth that helps ensure that product development is meeting business objectives. He is a member of the Management Roundtable where he is a FastTrack expert panelist, the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the Society of Concurrent Engineering (SoCE).