Product Development Consulting and Training Customized Services

For over twenty years our product development consulting and training have guided manufacturers toward cutting-edge development processes for delivering successful new products faster. Use this table to see how these customized product development consulting and training services can deliver greatest value to you:

Below is additional explanation of each of these options:

• Assessment

• Implementation

• Product development training

Consider blending these product development consulting and training options to suit you needs. For instance see how one client combined all three to upgrade their product development.

In the specific area of project risk management, we offer more focused services. You can download a description of these services or look at an overview of our project risk management approach.

If you are more interested in flexibility than speed in developing your products, see our page on flexible development services.

For broader information on how we typically work with clients to deliver this customized product development consulting and training, visit our Approach page, and for some guidance on hiring this work out versus doing it with internal resources, look at our product development consulting and training page.

Assessment

• Objective: Identify major opportunities to accelerate or otherwise improve how you develop products. Our focus is normally on short-term, actionable improvements that build momentum.

• Scope: Cross-functional, including at least R&D, marketing, and manufacturing and often also purchasing, finance, sales, quality, regulatory, and selected suppliers.

• Duration: Two to thirty days. More complete assessments include much more factual data collection to greatly improve understanding and acknowledgement of the opportunities. This naturally leads to ownership of the issues by those who must implement the changes. In turn, it greatly improves the prospects for corrective action and enduring improvement.

• Style: Top-down, collaborative, which means that we start broadly but narrow into the most potentially fruitful areas as we go. We create hypotheses as we proceed, and we test these by drawing facts from the client organization (usually from a selection of client projects). We enhance these tentative conclusions by working interactively with the client, both to test the validity of our path and to develop client ownership in the conclusions. In the end, our goal is to make the deliverable the client's action plan, not our conclusions.

• Involvement: Frequent cross-functional and multi-level interaction with client personnel. Client understanding and ownership of the issues is vital, and often the best actions for improvement come from unsuspected places in the client organization. To ensure that  functions such as purchasing and marketing are engaged in the solution, we involve them in discovering it.

• Methodology: Short assessments rely largely on semi-structured interviews with carefully chosen individuals and groups. More complete ones involve several proprietary techniques we apply as we work from general to specific findings.

• Deliverables: Normally, an oral presentation and discussion for short assessments, computer-projected presentation for intermediate assessments, and a written report and briefing for full assessments.

Interestingly, management sometimes has a reasonable appreciation beforehand for what ultimately become the final conclusions. The assessment yields the comfort that these "hunches" are in fact the core issues and supports them with undeniable facts. Moreover, the assessment builds confidence in those from various departments, which consolidates the whole organization behind the change effort. In the end, it becomes their plan, not the consultant's. Everyone gains satisfaction that the firm's resources are being applied beneficially in making the identified improvements. Clearly, more complete assessments go further toward achieving such benefits than short assessments.

Implementation

• Objective: Provide assistance and guidance in implementing identified opportunities for improvement.

• Source of opportunities: An assessment conducted by New Product Dynamics, the client, or jointly.

• Types (typical examples):

  • Initiate a specific improved practice, such as

    • Project capacity and portfolio management (see article and interview)

    • Project risk management (see article)

    • Continuous process improvement (see article)

  • Set up a pilot project (see Chapter 15 of our book)

    • Complete project

    • Specific portion of a project

  • Establish or strengthen real cross-functional teams (see three time-to-market handbook chapters or a conference report)

  • Create or improve your process to strengthen stages while streamlining the gates (see Chapters 9 and 10 of our book and the page on stage gate processes.) or to move away from a sequential process

• Style: Usually, a progressive approach to create momentum for improvement by discovering initial steps that build enthusiasm for further, more substantial change (see Our Approach page)

• Benefits: Although implementation can be completed without a consultant, expert guidance provides the assurance that the task will receive the attention needed to enjoy the improvement soon. In addiction, you receive the

  • Confidence that the result will be free of internal departmental biases.

  • Security that comes from applying the consultant's broad experience with similar implementations to avoid roadblocks and dead ends.

Training

Our most popular training is a two-day in-house workshop, which is perfect for building cross-functional teams. The workshop enhances learning and prepares its participants for carry-through after the workshop:

• The material is customized to the audience by working with key managers to relate the content to where the organization is today and where -- and how fast -- it would like to improve.

• Either exercises chosen by the client organization from the instructor's repertoire or a focused discussion relates the material to the specific opportunities the organization faces today.

• A workbook for each participant that includes all slides used in the workshop.

• The content basically follows Developing Products in Half the Time, which the organization normally provides to each participant; this book provides an excellent reference and narration to the workbook as participants implement their plans after the workshop.

• The emphasis throughout is on building realistic, actionable improvement plans to be implemented after the workshop. Several activities keep this goal paramount:

  • Ideally, a respected client executive launches the workshop by setting expectations for improvement, for example, not only the magnitude desired but also the degree to which improvement should be focused at the participants' level versus broader opportunities.

  • At over a dozen points during the workshop, we stop and explicitly and individually note gaps and opportunities before they slip out of mind.

  • The last portion of the workshop covers techniques for organizational change, and then the participants build their action plans -- individually, as small natural work groups, or as a complete class -- as appropriate.

  • Again, ideally, the same executive who launched the workshop returns to "receive" the action plans and ensure that they are actionable and targeted at appropriate levels in the organization.

  • Two to three months after the workshop, the instructor returns for another day to extend the original learning and strengthen the action plans. We use the third day in any way mutually agreed -- after the outcome of the original workshop is apparent -- to extend the improvement.

This improvement-focused approach gives management confidence that the organization will indeed gain ongoing value from its investment in the workshop.

The two-day version just described is only the most popular option. Training sessions can be as short as thirty minutes, for example, when addressing corporate meetings. Such short sessions are usually much more focused and do not concentrate on action planning. Longer versions are also possible.

Public versions of the two-day workshop are offered by JF Pearson in Shanghai (one day), Beijing, Taipei, and Bangalore; by Kavaq in Malaysia, Singapore, and Manila; by Universal Training in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta; the Silicon Valley Technical Institute; and the Manufacturing Management & Technology Institute.

We offer similar training in project risk management. See our page on this topic, or specifically the training options in project risk management.

Or you can explore training related to our new book, Flexible Product Development.

Combined Services

In general, we tailor combinations of services to meet client objectives.

Consider a recent engagement for a Midwestern United States manufacturer of pumps:

• Spent two days interviewing individuals and teams in various departments, different levels, and two divisions (assessment)
• Prepared an eight-hour presentation and discussion, based on the findings of the short assessment, for twelve members of senior management, including the CEO (training)
• Built, from this discussion,  a list of 23 "Quick Hits" that the top management team selected for initial implementation. The CEO assigned each of these 23 to someone in the room before the session ended.
• We were asked by the client to take the lead on five of the Quick Hits, which we completed in nine days over the next two months (implementation)

The deliverables in this engagement were

• Handout package of the 139 executive presentation slides
• Final briefing to the CEO and the heads of engineering of their two divisions