Product development process elements

Decision-select path and direction

The most important role of decision-making is to select the most appropriate direction based on your strategic objectives when there are multiple choices. When making a wrong decision, it is still difficult to make great efforts later. Therefore, making a decision is an important part of IPD. In the initial stage, the level of decision makers has the greatest impact on the decision-making effect, because the decision-making effect often depends more on the experience of experts, experienced experts often give the most valuable routes and directions. However, people often make mistakes in experience and habit thinking. Therefore, Team review is an important part of scientific decision-making, when making major decisions, you must rely on data for scientific analysis.

Decisions are still driven by goals. First, they are driven by short-term goals or long-term goals, and then analyzed based on historical data. Make scientific analysis and decision-making based on the influence and weight of each factor affecting the target. During the entire lifecycle of product development, the selection of each technology and solution, or each stage or activity, will involve decision-making, what we need to do is to make scientific decisions so that product development does not deviate from the goal and direction. Therefore, phase review is an important means.

Each stage of product development is a complete project, with clear objectives and input and output. Through the phase review, you can better detect problems and release risks in advance. Make scientific decisions by experts with important roles in product development activities to ensure the overall progress is not deviated and effective.

Project Team Composition-product-driven cross-functional teams

The composition of a project team is a key element of the product development process. An efficient project team greatly increases communication, collaboration, and decision-making. Both projects and functions exist in matrix organizations, but the final development of products will be reflected in projects and parallel and coordination between multiple projects. The development of a product may include multiple functional departments such as process, design, logistics, market, and server. To ensure systems involving multiple products and projects, a core project team must be established to better reflect the product development ideas and manage all tasks related to the project. Functional Departments aim to provide resources and training resources, while the project team aims to utilize and coordinate existing materials to complete the parallel and coordination of the entire product development process.

The ipmt integrated product management team is the decision-making layer, focusing on giving full play to the advantages of experts and providing high-level decisions. The PDT Product Development Team focuses on product development and implementation of ipmt strategies based on structured product development methods and process management.

Development Activity structure-the process must be structured

When we are thinking that invention and creation are based on personal moments of inspiration, the new invention theory tells us that there are still some rules and steps to create a new invention. Product development is regarded as an art and relies on creativity and inspiration. However, the refinement of the social division of labor and the expansion of the product itself are no longer a task that can be simply done by one person, more needs are the parallel collaboration of multiple organizations and teams. To achieve this asynchronous mode and keep everyone at the same pace, you must import a structured product development process.

For companies whose processes are not structured, the entire development process is random or the process is uncontrolled. Each project team defines its own process, this experience and practice in product development is hard to be shared at the organizational level. An important purpose of a structured process is to extract experience and solidify it into the process to maintain coordination and consistency across functional organizations. However, solidification is not rigid. Many companies have defined structured processes, but they have not been well implemented. There are many reasons why improvements require cultural changes that are not well implemented, but the key issue is still the absence of a culture and value of continuous improvement with full participation.

Although the process has been implemented, it has not produced the expected benefits. Enterprises are afraid that they have not been smooth yet but have launched a running process, or the consulting company has simply used the practices of other companies to make great changes to the process. When the actual problems faced by enterprises are not solved, the launch of macro-level planning is futile, and organizations and individuals have an expectation for benefits in the process, beyond this expectation, the passion for improvement will be lost, and the rigid process will become a reality.

The structured process in the pace method is divided into several levels. First, a product development process is defined by 15-20 main steps. Each step is divided into 10-30 tasks that define how each task can be implemented in the company. These tasks are defined by standard templates, instructions, procedures, and entrance and exit guidelines. Each task can be further subdivided into development activities. For the development process of different products, the steps and tasks should generally be the same, but the specific development activities can be different.

Development tools and technologies

The process is formed by process + method tool technology + people. The most important role of development tool technology and related information systems is to solidify the structured process and convert the hidden knowledge into explicit knowledge. The two main lines of product R & D management are IPD + cmme, and they need to be better integrated. The focus of IPD is on the product level. You need to consider how to sell the developed product. In terms of process management, cmme must ensure that high-quality products can be developed. Therefore, PDM, Project Management Information System, and CMI process management system are both powerful support tools and auxiliary decision-making tools.

In the product R & D process of an enterprise, the organizational goals should be driven based on the business objectives, and specific product development goals and project objectives should be driven based on the organizational objectives, therefore, QFD can be used as a good structured decision-making tool. Many problems are often not about tools and technologies, but about the change of thinking and consciousness and culture. If our thinking consciousness is not changed, the structured decision-making process and methodology are not formed, and the best tools cannot achieve the results.

Product strategic process

Product strategy is also the most important decision in product development, which directly affects the company's benefits and core competitiveness. If there is a problem with the planned product quality or delay, it is often a problem at the project level, but if it is not sold well or has not achieved the expected benefits, it is a problem in the product development process, this is a major deviation in the product strategy. New product R & D needs to be driven by goals. This goal is the strategic planning, coexistence of risks and benefits, coexistence of short-term and long-term benefits, starting speed and acceleration, all these contradictions must be clarified in the product strategy.

Introducing portfolio project management and risk-benefit analysis models, project screening aims to provide decision-making layers with various basic data needed to make strategic decisions. Resources of an enterprise are limited, and it is impossible to develop all products or projects. Each product or project affects the company's risky benefits and short-term long-term benefits. Enterprises focus on short-term benefits to solve survival issues. Enterprises focus on long-term benefits to solve development and acceleration issues. Enterprises may develop different strategic plans at different stages of development.

The product strategy truly links the company's overall business strategy with the product development strategy. Pace provides a product strategic framework. A product strategic vision must answer three questions: What is the company's goal? How to achieve the goal? Why is it successful. A product strategy is a general roadmap similar to a knowledge map, which allows each product developer to understand their current location and target location.

Technology management-accumulation and Innovation

An enterprise first needs to find out where its core competitiveness is, whether it is the market, logistics or R & D products. When our competitiveness is reflected in the product itself, the core technology becomes more important. As long as these core technologies are available, the technical risks of product development are reduced. What we often tend to do is to focus only on the market, while the order ignores the product and technology itself. However, only with the core technology can enterprises have a long-term, stable, and sustainable development impetus.

Investment in technology must be forward-looking, especially pre-research on new technologies. Because many companies do not have core technologies, or are surprised by key technologies, the entire product development may be extended indefinitely and the market will be lost.

Pipeline Management-centralized strength to advantage Projects

Through core team building, phase review and promotion of structured processes, enterprises can quickly push single-project products to the market. However, enterprises often develop multiple products and run multiple projects simultaneously in the face of market incentive competition. In this case, we must coordinate product strategies, project management, and functional management. The coordination focuses on strategic balance, the load of pipelines and communication between project functions.

The role of MPs queue management is to balance and coordinate. First, we need to set the priority of various opportunities and objectives in a strategic balance. At the same time, we need to consider the management load based on the TOC constraint theory. Through a structured process, the introduction of phase and phase reviews can achieve better resource allocation and fine-tuning. The phase review has shifted from focusing on individual projects to focusing on multiple products and projects. Only by focusing on multiple projects and priorities can we make better resource allocation based on the objectives.

I bought 35 horse racing horses with 80 turtles. After introducing the pipeline load mechanism, I can better centralize advantageous resources to the most valuable products and projects. When the MPs queue capacity is fixed, you must first consider ensuring that the MPs queue is not idle and has a certain degree of saturation at any time. The second is to gradually filter out low-priority products or projects during pipeline flow. In the early stage of product development, you must accurately estimate the product and project scale to better plan the pipeline capacity, only a better combination of hard tasks and soft tasks in an MPS queue can create maximum benefits.