The business calendars of many consumer product markets allow simplification of the management of concurrent product development projects. The path and timing for new product introduction into specific consumer markets is typically constrained by a few well-defined sales-driven events. Depending on the specifics of the market, the events can be industry-wide (e.g., trade shows and buying fairs), driven by the specifics of the customers (e.g., opens-to-buy, consumer catalog design freeze dates, and planned promotional events), or the manufacturers themselves (e.g., sales meetings, and catalog/price list release dates). If products that are under development do not meet these key dates, their release is out of sync with buyer and market expectations and planning, resulting in less successful market introductions.
While business calendars constrain the latter stages of the product development schedule, they also provide an opportunity to simplify the management of parallel projects by allowing a single calendar to be overlaid on much of the development process. Since, within a product category, development projects frequently require the same or similar tasks, to a large degree these projects can be run concurrently using a common process.
Larger projects are often split into stages (e.g., Ideation, Concept Development, Design, Commercialization and Launch) that are separated by gate reviews to minimize the investment risk as projects work their way through to market release. Dividing project tasks into different stages with clearly defined gates also helps the visualization of the status of large, complex projects by breaking them down into tractable groups of related work elements.
Concurrent development projects that share a common calendar and process can be easily managed using visual control boards that have been popularized in many lean processes. Correctly applied, these visual control boards can facilitate the management and coordination of large numbers of parallel development projects with very little overhead. They also function as an excellent tool for on-the-fly coordination and allocation of competing resources, status reporting, and identification of problematic projects and process bottlenecks.
In summary, the benefits of using this approach for managing concurrent product development projects include:
- Stronger new product introductions resulting from timely release to market
- Increased quality and quantity of released new products
- Reduced technical, market and investment risk
- Smarter, agile resource allocation
- Enhanced visibility of the status of a large number of projects at one time
- Better and earlier resolution of problems by using a common venue for identifying and addressing project-related issues
- Increased development team motivation and cross-support
- Strengthened interdepartmental communication and coordination
By simplifying the product development process, using concurrent product development, companies can generate more and better new products with fewer resources.
