WD-40 No Mess Pen: A Quick Draw to Success

The WD-40 No-Mess Pen is the first ever line extension for the WD-40 brand. Ms. Barry will give candid insights into why WD-40 explored this product opportunity, the steps taken to make this innovative leap and how this product reached the market in record pace. Specifically, Ms. Barry will examine:

• How WD-40 paved the way to a highly successful product development process and structure - the creation of Team Tomorrow

• How WD-40 leveraged its product development process to accelerate the launch cycle

  • Which steps were bypassed, quickened or done simultaneously

  • What was done to achieve top-down buy-in

  • How this approach allowed WD-40 to win customer approval

• How WD-40 used Virtual R&D to gain speed, innovation and still maintain quality

Balancing Unrestrained Creativity with ROI and Time-to-Market

In many companies, there are large R&D staffs and budgets. And in product or service companies, there are certainly core teams that develop and market new products. But how does one explore and incubate ideas that go beyond core R&D but are too speculative to fund and launch into market today? What changes in company governance, metrics, methodology, and culture are needed to foster and drive such speculative ideas, many of which may never be launched commercially? How do we strike the balance between creativity and unrestrained exploration on one hand, with the need for return on investment and time to market goals on the other hand? How does innovation align or mis-align with corporate strategies when innovation is exploring unchartered ground? Pragnesh Shah will discuss these issues, innovation methods, and ingredients for success and key challenges.

Speed to Market and Project Success
in 14 weeks

Cargill is focusing on Innovation to create distinctive value and to accelerate growth. To further increase speed to market for innovation, the company has been focusing on process efficiency. Ms. Dykema will discuss how the Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) initiative was born within the Food Ingredients & Systems North America group of businesses and how this has resulted in a common process methodology around new product and services development.

Attendees will learn how to break the mould of working in the ‘old ways’ and how to obtain buy-in across diverse and complex businesses and geographies. They will leave with a better understanding of how to go about designing a single coherent project management process for a business group – and in record time.

JDSU's Improvement Map for Speeding Product Development

JDSU is a manufacturer of electrical test equipment. It has been on a multiyear journey to improve its time to market. This presentation will review tools and disciplines like better product definition, front loading problem solving, and project level risk analysis. Successful improvements have been made to development efforts by way of increased communication methods, minor and major process revisions, as well as introducing cross functional test strategies resulting in months taken off project schedules. An overall team-based culture focused on improving TTM was introduced and amplified over time through the utilization of these techniques.

The Magic of Execution:
How We Became a Market Leader

In 2006 HP declared a bold vision to be the "symbol of photography" in the 21st century and launched a full portfolio of digital photography solutions. HP's R967 is the world's first consumer 10 megapixel camera. This is a tremendous achievement considering that just a few years ago we were struggling to keep pace with the competition and meet our launch dates. The turning point was when in 2004 our senior management team identified that while we were great at conceptualizing technologies and products, execution is what kept us from achieving great results. Therefore we decided to implement an Execution Management system based on critical chain principles. Within one year we more than doubled the number of models and launched them all on time while reducing our R&D costs by 25%.

Enabling Faster, More Predictable
Software Development

In today's increasingly digital world, software development has become a critical component of product development. Often hardware delivery depends on developing embedded software. In fact, many times the software itself is the deliverable. Speeding product development, then, may mean innovating faster, more predictable ways to build software.

Hardware engineering isn't easy, but it surely has some advantages over software. The product can be described and designed in unambiguous, measurable terms: length, weight, material types, tolerances. It can be modeled, then translated to the proper scale with no change to the fundamental engineering. Project schedule and components can be reliably predicted based on previous similar experiences. None of these statements is true of software, a newer discipline, which sometimes feels more like an art than a science. Moreover, the more complex the system, the less effective we find the traditional hardware engineering process.

In this presentation, we will look at different software development models and types of projects in which each is effective. In particular, we'll focus on the challenges of a complex system, using the Advanced Diagnostics and Engine Management (ADEM) system as an example, to explore some project lessons learned that can improve project pace, risk and reliability.

Transforming the Process of Innovation: Powering New Product Development and Introduction Success

Innovation can come in many different forms and is more than just cool new products or technologies. The clever bit, it would seem, is linking it all together, to meet some desired objective that somehow differentiates from the crowd.

Of course there are some basic things that need to happen. However wiring people and processes together to select and execute the right ideas to bring them to market at the right time, in the most effective way, is harder than it would appear.

Together Aberdeen Group & UGS undertook research to examine what made leading companies successful and to outline tangible actions that can help transform the process of innovation.

Although there’s no magic potion to be had the World’s most innovative companies go beyond creativity and do share some interesting commonalities.

• 3 x More likely to regularly measure and use key performance indicators

• 3 x More likely to have a senior management responsibility

• 4 x More likely to have integrated & centralized data and process

This presentation will outline some of the findings from this, and other research, and start to detail some of the specific actions companies can take to better orchestrate their innovation efforts to meet a common goal and outline the tools available to help.

VAXinate Your Portfolio
for Maximum Health and Performance

Is your portfolio sick? Is it sluggish (cycle times too long)? Is it always tired (low value)? You’ve got a problem! You’ve got to get your portfolio healthy fast or your stakeholders will be calling for the undertaker (or your job!). Get your portfolio on the road to recovery TODAY. Get it VAXinated!

Product development expert, Gene Kania, will introduce you to the VAX System for maximizing the health and performance of your product development project portfolio. Every portfolio must excel in 3 key areas:

• VALUE – if it’s not high value, why are you doing it?
• ACHIEVABILITY – it may be a great idea, but if you don’t have the resources, how will it get done?
• EXECUTION – if you can’t execute, then how can you compete?

Using principles from project lifecycle and constraints management, Gene has developed the VAX System which combines value, achievability and execution into a single integrated portfolio management process and solution that will ensure a healthy recovery and a long life for any project portfolio. Plus, he will introduce you to a unique measurement system that will allow you to measure the health of your portfolio in real-time for all three key parameters. How cool is that?

Successful portfolio management is all about good decision making. When do you kill a project? When do you start one? When do you add resources? When do you expedite? The VAX System gives you the information that your management team needs to make the best decisions every day. Get your portfolio healthy! Get it VAXinated today!

Execution: The Missing Link

In winning organizations everyone knows what to do and when to do it. Without this knowledge, targets are missed and opportunities are lost. At the same time, due to the intrinsic uncertainties in New Product Development, execution is what stumps managers. Using case studies from leading high tech companies, Taher will present how a new method of managing execution not only allows them to meet timelines but to even increase NPD speed and throughput.

An Integrated Process
for Speeding Innovation

Innovation is a primary driver of growth for many companies today, and it is essential to derive an acceptable return on the investment in innovation. In many cases, the overall investment in innovation is not being monitored and measured, and simply speeding up development efforts is not the only answer to maximizing the return. A case for an integrated process and systems vision for speeding innovation will be presented covering:

• How do all the pieces fit together?

• Using the system and tools to create efficiencies

• What system performance should be expected?

• Tying it back to business performance

Ideation for Compressed Time-to-Market

One of the keys to being successful within the world of startups is the balance of ideation and the execution of product development. Nurturing the ideation process and executing product development are generally conflicting activities. This work presents the methods used and the culture that developed within a startup which produced a revolutionary medical device and launched the product to a global marketplace in preparation for a successful IPO. The approach presented here, if properly led, can contribute to a team that is able to introduce disruptive technologies under a predictable timeline, meeting the incredible demands of a late stage startup.

Leveraging Co-Development
for Increased Speed to Innovation

The E&PS division of Texas Instruments has been leveraging co-development to increase speed of innovation and strengthen its core capabilities.  Mr. Balyta will discuss how TI successfully used global co-development to tap into pockets of specialized knowledge throughout the world to increase innovation and their speed of software development.  He will outline the key factors for success including processes, communication, and training.

By attending this session, attendees will learn how the effective global co-development of software helped TI significantly reduce its product development cycle.  Attendees will walk away with concrete actions to consider for implementation into their own businesses.

Speeding Product Development By Changing The Project Management Mindset

Rapid New Product Development requires an integrated toolset to ensure the output of quality products in a facile, lean development and production environment. The tools of traditional project management may not offer the best options for the rapid development of high quality products. Further, enterprise-wide implementation of facile, lean project management tools may not result in the desired outcome if the behaviors underlying these tools, as well as those needed to support their implementation, are weak or nonexistent within the organization. We present arguments that critical chain management tools are facile and lean; approaches are presented to ensure that behaviors consistent with critical chain are promulgated throughout the organization. Mindsets are discussed that are contrary to this endeavor which are implicit in non-lean planning tools; alternatives are identified.

Finally, case studies are presented to illustrate the power of critical chain management, including the utility of metrics to measure and communicate project status, the capability to enable rapid project completion at the appropriate level of quality, and the possibility of maintaining team morale and retention during this demanding process.

Zero Tolerance: A Paradigm for Predictable, On-Time Product Delivery

Shure Inc. has a legacy of delivering high quality, high performance, professional audio electronics and microphones. The pace of product development is seldom pushed at the compromise of quality and performance, an appropriate paradigm for customer segments with little competitive advantage from being first-to-market or fast-to-market. With Shure’s business expansion into a new customer space, that of consumer products, this paradigm no longer served the business. Product availability for consumer product resellers is simple: late means “no sale”.

Ms. Élan will discuss the challenge of shifting a traditional phase-gate product development process into a fast, flexible, but still predictive process that delivers products on time. She will introduce the paradigm of “Zero Tolerance”, a cultural shift used to change behaviors and expectations of project planning and execution. She will examine a number of product development examples that leverage ideas such as “rolling the schedule”, fast failures, early re-scope, and de-emphasizing the budget.