Background
Change is a natural
part of new product innovation. However, the processes and
techniques that management commonly uses to develop products (Six
Sigma, Stage-Gate®, and traditional project
management, for instance) are not designed to facilitate change.
Instead, they encourage heavy upfront planning and reward sticking
to plan. Rather than resisting or denying change, why not build
systems that embrace it?
This workshop shows you how to build
such flexible product development systems. It applies principles
from the successful recent model of agile software development,
although most of the agile software tools do not translate to
non-software products directly.
This topic is most timely. In these
highly competitive times, pressures to get the most out of product
development resources have pushed managers to structure their
development so that it is predictable and to do everything right the
first time to eliminate waste. Unfortunately, the same competitive
pressures cause customers to change their minds and competitors to
do unpredictable things while new technologies appear or do not work
as advertised. That is, change happens.
The most successful
new products are ones that exploit these changes. These products are
truly new, and they excite customers. Developers who really listen
to their customers and modify designs based on feedback from initial
prototypes will face change. Those who opt to push new technologies
will have to make changes as they go.
Consequently, this
workshop starts from what will make a winning product—change—and
proceeds to build development processes that can accommodate such
change, even when it occurs relatively late in the development
process, with tolerable disruption.
We will explore
several categories of tools to enhance flexibility. We explain each
tool and consider its strengths and limitations. Then we turn to a
case study that runs for the length of the workshop, where we apply
the tool to the case study project to gain essential hands-on
practice in applying it. You will see not only how you apply the
tool, but how others, working independently, apply it too. |
