Product Development Expertise: Why Engage a Consultant?

Product development experts that you engage externally represent an investment with potentially great and long-lasting implications for your corporate profitability and product development capability. However, such "discretionary" funds are the first to be cut when times are tight. It seems that much of what a product development consultant and trainer provides could be handled internally more economically. Lets' take a look at this.

External product development management expertise offers several benefits:

• A broad base of product development experience across both your specific industry and across  industries.

• Experience with techniques that work -- and those that don't. For instance, we have often seen management rely too heavily on computerized product development tools.

• Full-time dedication to improvement, unlike your people, who have many existing responsibilities.

• Related to this, an efficient approach. Because we have been down this road before, we don't waste time on dead ends.

• An independent perspective, without a departmental bias.

• A candid evaluation, which is unlikely from an insider who considers confronting senior management with how things really are at the risk of her/his career.

• A longer-term perspective than is likely from those immersed in daily details.

Of these, the most important is probably the third one. Repeatedly, we have encountered managers who sincerely wanted to improve their product development. Realistically, they can devote ten percent of their time to it, so it takes ten times longer than necessary, delaying the benefit. Worse, going at this pace, this second-priority effort is likely to lose momentum and fail entirely.

An alternative is to use someone from outside of product development, such as Quality or Human Resources, who may have time available. This may solve the time problem but creates bigger issues. Because these outsiders have not developed products themselves, they make assumptions that tend to add unnecessary work to the process. This either results in an unwieldy process with unneeded steps or your product developers then have to spend their time arguing for simplicity. The worst outcome, which happens frequently, is that the cumbersome process is never really adopted.

External consultants can fall into the same lack-of-ownership trap. At New Product Dynamics, we approach product development enhancement interactively, with many client personnel consulted throughout, precisely to overcome this ownership hurdle. And we progressively turn the reins over to the client organization early for the same reason.

In summary, consider whether developing new products is a strategic competence for your organization. If so, is it worth investing in? What is the best, most certain, and fastest way to get improvement?

If you are concerned about your time to market, calculate your cost of delay (for an introduction to cost of delay, see Exhibit 2 in our "Reaping" article). These calculations may convince you to move ahead quickly in accelerating or otherwise improving how you are developing new products.

If the cost of engaging a management consultant is a major consideration, remember that some large consultancies have high overhead rates to support the supplemental services they offer. To get the most from your investment in product development consulting and training, consider a smaller consultancy.

Read an overview of how we can work with you.

For further guidance on engaging a management consultant, read How to Hire a Management Consultant, published by the Institute of Management Consultants USA.