Conference Presentations

Thursday, February 22, 2001

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Managing Resources as if Profit Matters
Don Reinertsen, co-author of Developing Products in Half the Time, author of Managing the Design Factory, and President, Reinertsen and Associates

Nowhere do product development managers search more desperately for "silver bullets" than in the area of managing resources. And well they should, for poor management of resources alone can completely erase the benefits of brilliant management of EVERY other aspect of product development. Unfortunately, new methods are frequently sold as universally applicable ‘best practices’. What will actually determine whether you derive economic benefit from a new method is the missing link between the new philosophy and your economics. Don Reinertsen will discuss how to ground your adoption of these new ideas on underlying economics. He will test some of the economic issues behind major philosophies. Should all constraints be eliminated? Is waste always bad? Should you try to filter out all bad projects? Will conformance to specification ensure economic success?

Making the Pipeline Flow Faster:
Reducing Waste, Managing Constraints

TOC Segment
Chair: Lisa Scheinkopf, Chesapeake Consulting, Inc.

Synchronous R&D at Novopharm
Real Duteau, Senior VP of R&D, Novopharm Limited

Hear why Novopharm (which last year became a wholly owned subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.) decided to make a fundamental shift in managing the flow of work and garnered a much greater return on R&D investment dollars. Implementation strategies, lessons learned and results of adopting the Synchronous approach to project and resource management will be examined.

Implementing Constraints Management —
How to Get Started
Melissa Lage, VP Business Systems, SJE/Rhombus

Faced with too many projects, too much multi-tasking and too many design changes, SJE/Rhombus decided to apply theory of constraints (TOC). As a small company, project prioritization and resource constraints identification were especially critical. This presentation will cover the nuts-and-bolts: defining the problems, focusing the team to act like a roadrunner, getting buy-in, and building a process for continuous improvement.

Luncheon Breakouts

Against Planning and Optimization:
An Execution-Driven Approach for
Boosting Portfolio ROI and
Expanding Pipeline Capacity
Sanjeev Gupta, CEO, Speed to Market

Organizations need a breakthrough in execution. Traditional thinking ignores the reality of today’s development pressures:

• As portfolio ROI’s become more and more time-sensitive, leverage lies not in front-end optimization, but in predictable delivery of the entire portfolio.
• How can organizations accept the results of a planning exercise that requires them to cut their pipeline by 50%? Only way they can deliver more with same resources is by eliminating THE systemic source of capacity wastage during execution.

Sanjeev will present a fresh approach that is being used successfully by organizations such as Johnson Controls, Lucent, Seagate and Siemens.

Implementing Synchronous
Project Management (or any other change initative)
Lisa Scheinkopf, Chesapeake Consulting

Research shows that at least 75% of all major change initiatives fail. Changing the practices and paradigms by which your organization plans, executes, and controls its projects can certainly be classified as a major change initiative.

• Identify the key changes made to project planning, execution, and control that accompany a Synchronous Project Management (TOC-based project management) implementation
• Understand the 8 reasons that 75% of change initiatives fail
• Learn what your implementation must contain in order to overcome those 8 reasons

Lean Segment
Chair: Dr. Allen Ward, Ward Synthesis

Stabilizing Operations for High Effectiveness
Allen Ward, President, Ward Synthesis

Conventional resource management accepts chaotic variation as a given, and tries to deal with it by detailed, centralized planning. Unfortunately, the plans can rarely be followed. Indeed, the plans them-selves become a source of variation. Thus, the next step is expediting and adjusting Lean Resource Management using the value stream mapping technique to establish regular patterns of events. Resource management is then handled via decentralized negotiations—yielding significant results: in product development, conventional resource management wastes at least 80% of the most critical resources whereas lean development wastes less than 20%.

Resource Management in a
Lean Product Development Environment
James E. Luckman, Chief Engineer, Fuel Control Products and Site Manager, Delphi Automotive

The common misconception in business today is that there are not enough resources to accomplish all the jobs we have. Once you  recognize that over 80% of what you are asking your people to do is waste, you can begin to address ways of doubling the throughput of your projects without adding resources. Technical Center Rochester of Delphi Automotive has been transforming to a lean engineering site for 3-1/2 years. Hear how resource management takes on a different meaning in a lean environment where boundaries are blurred, cross-functional alignment around projects exists, and fast cycle solutions are expected.

• Understand the elements of a lean product development environment.

• Learn how to align people around value added work.

• Learn how to manage projects to maximize the use of critical resources

Strategy Segment
Chair: TBD

A Systems Approach to Momentum Management
Jeffrey Lind, Principal Engineer, Boeing Airplane Systems

When you get right down to it, managing research and development is about managing momentum. It involves a vital balance of innovative thinking and a deliberate focusing of effort to achieve competitive advantage. Faced with today's staggering array of options and opportunities, it's easy to lose focus and allow ourselves to be driven more by personalities and events than by purpose. Momentum Management seeks to facilitate purposeful thinking about the future and carry this purpose forward into the way we make decisions, manage resources, and deploy innovation. This session will overview key considerations for managing momentum in a large organization, such as:

• The role of vision in achieving momentum.
• Decision making and prioritization.
• Enterprise DNA as a balancing factor.
• Innovation development and maturity.
• Deployment methodology that harvests the fruits of innovation for the enterprise.

Matching Resource Allocations to Strategic Priorities in a Dynamic Environment
Bill Branan, Director, Regional Portfolio Strategy, Motorola, Inc.

In developing integrated communication solutions (which range from off-the-shelf $200 two-way radio products to custom engineered systems well in excess of $100M), Motorola CGISS (Commercial, Government, and Industrial Solutions Sector) must consider global vs. regional needs, rapidly changing market conditions, competition, long design cycles, moving technologies, multiple design and manufacturing centers, outsourcing and partnering relationships, and the ever-present schedule slips.

This talk will provide organizational and situational context and examples of tools and processes used to keep the customer first. These include intranet-based global resource allocation and planning, product roadmap processes, use of stage gates, and change management methods.

Using an Intranet-Based Product Pipeline & Resource Management Tool to Drive Strategic Decision Making
Kenneth Goncharoff, Senior Program Manager, Tellabs Operations, Inc.

Committed to improving time-to-market while maintaining quality levels, Tellabs Operations, Inc., launched a corporate-wide pipeline management initiative in the Spring of 1999. Challenges to the initiative included no common definition for resource management, poor visibility of resource capacity and allocation across divisions, and an entrepreneurial culture. Today, product pipelines are a common attribute across all Tellabs divisions and resource management is synonymous with project management. Learn how the development and integration of an Intranet-based product pipeline and resource management tool has positively influenced strategic decision making at Tellabs.

• Learn how an intranet-based tool can accurately depict a global organization’s resource and Time-To-Market (TTM) data

• Understand what type of decisions can be made with resource and TTM data

• Learn how to analyze data to optimize strategic decision-making

Friday, February 23, 2001

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Making Resource Management Work:
What It Takes to Achieve Real Results
Michael McGrath, Managing Director, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM)

A well-recognized expert in the area of product development performance improvement, Michael McGrath has a great deal of insight into managing resources across projects for maximum throughput and strategic value. Michael’s keynote address will focus on the implementation side of project resource management. Going beyond theory, he will draw on several hard hitting case examples to describe what companies need to do to achieve the results they seek. Who should be accountable for resource management? What is the leadership role of senior management? What does it take to get the information needed to make good resource management decisions? How can companies go from one-shot rationalizations to ongoing optimization? Michael will also provide his perspective on what leading companies are doing and how resource management will change in the future.

Getting the Right Information,
Making the Right Moves

Implementation Segment
Chair: Mark Deck, Director,
Pittiglio Rabin McGrath & Rabin (PRTM)

Achieving Functional Resource Leadership
in a Cross-Functional World
Kalli LeFevre, VP Core Networks, Carrier Data Networks R&D, Nortel Networks

Over the last two years, Nortel has undergone a transformation in the way innovative customer valued solutions are brought from opportunity to market. The Time to Market (TTM) business model focuses on small, startup-like business teams that integrat  func-tional expertise with a project to market focus. This has created enormous change for functional management, especially in R&D, which traditionally drove projects. This presentation will focus on how that change was made. Key topics will include the new role of R&D functional management in a project focused environment, managing resource assignments and resource requirements for a complex portfolio of projects, balancing resource capacity and demand, and building functional excellence.

Resource Allocation to Achieve Maximum Strategic Value
Shirley Blanch, Executive Consultant & Change Specialist, Technology & Portfolio Planning, Ethicon, Inc.

Portfolio management is all about creating and maintaining a project portfolio that provides maximum strategic value. Accomplishing this requires achieving the right balance between strategic business objectives, potential project opportunities and resource capacity / capability constraints. This session will introduce the methodologies used at Ethicon, a franchise of the Johnson & Johnson Company, to make project selection and resource allocation decisions across a portfolio that spans four global business units. It will address aggregate resource allocations across business units, prioritization of projects within business units and determination of an optimal portfolio mix that is in alignment with strategic objects and resource availability. Making sound resource trade-off decisions in light of ongoing changes to the business environment will also be addressed.