Best Practices | |
| Whatever happened to best practices? | April 2007 |
Cost of Delay | |
| Are there situations where cost-of-delay calculations don’t apply? | January 1999 |
| Calculating the cost of delay | December 1998 |
Fuzzy Front End | |
| Why is listening to the customer so difficult? | July 2008 |
| What do you mean by market shifts when you speak of flexibility? | January 2008 |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by working with customers? | March 2006 |
| How can we come up with more/better new-product ideas? | April 2004 |
| Should we depend on Sales to keep our customers happy? | January 2005 |
| How can we accelerate decision making, particularly in the fuzzy front end? | March 2003 |
| How can we keep from being blindsided when world priorities shift? | October 2001 |
| How can I capture the voice of the customer? | March 2001 |
| How do I hear the voice of the customer as I develop a new product? | October 2000 |
| Should engineers be spending their precious time visiting customers? | December 1999 |
Management Issues | |
| Contemporary Management Methods Encourage Rigidity | Article |
Metrics | |
| How can I tell if we did well at developing our last product? | October 2003 |
Organizational Change | |
| Is the CEO important to flexible product development? | July 2007 |
Planning | |
| How can I make our plans to improve product development “stick?” | January 2001 |
| How can we avoid “technology push” without avoiding technology? | July 2000 |
| What should my boss do to speed up product development? | January 2000 |
| How much does it cost to speed up product development? | September 1999 |
| Can we accelerate product development using a “Faster, Better, Cheaper” program? | August 1999 |
Product Development Process |
| What is the most important factor in improving product development? | October 2008 |
| What are the keys to installing a new product development process? | June 2005 |
| Why do we have so much fire fighting, even when we manage our development process methodically? | January 2002 |
| Should we be using a stages-and-gates product development process? | September 2001 |
| Doesn’t rapid product development mean that quality will suffer? | September 2000 |
| How do I find truly valuable development process improvements? | June 1999 |
| Cycle Time Compression Can Be Inappropriate | Article |
| New Product Development and Fast Cycle Time | Article |
| Stage Gate* Process Versus Time to Market | Article |
| Time to Market Improvement in Product Development | Article |
Flexible Product Development |
| Isn’t the iteration that accompanies flexible product development wasteful? | June 2008 |
| Is there a development process for flexible product development? | April 2008 |
| Does flexible product development complement or contradict lean product development? | December 2007 |
| Does flexible product development complement or contradict phased development processes? | October 2007 |
| What is the connection between flexible product development and time to market? | June 2007 |
| How can I make our product development process more flexible? | March 2007 |
| In general, how do I improve the flexibility of my product development? | January 2007 |
| How can we improve the flexibility of our product development process? | August 2005 |
| How is flexibility beneficial in developing new products? | July 2005 |
| How can we complete our design work if marketing keeps changing the requirements? | December 2004 |
| What can we do to “freeze” our product’s specifications? | March 2004 |
| Flexible Development Isn’t Free | Article |
Project Management | |
| How can I make our project management more flexible? | December 2006 |
| Project Management: Often Misapplied to Product Development | Article |
Resources | |
| What resources on the Internet do other product developers use? | April 2001 |
| Where can I read about new product development techniques? | December 2000 |
Risk | |
| How do I manage risk on a project that keeps changing? | September 2008 |
| What is the connection between flexible product development and project risk management? | September 2007 |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by changing our decision making? | October 2006 |
| How can we accelerate the risk management process for accelerated projects? | May 2005 |
| My boss frequently stalls on decisions. Is this fast time to market? | October 2004 |
| How are other companies doing at managing project risk? | January 2004 |
| What else can we do to facilitate talking about risk? | June 2003 |
| How can I manage my project’s risk when my boss won’t even discuss risk? | April 2003 |
| What are the biggest mistakes I can make in managing project risk? | September 2002 |
| How will improvements in managing project risk affect time to market? | June 2002 |
| Is project risk management a methodical process? | April 2002 |
| How do we understand, as a team, the risks that a project faces? | March 2002 |
| Is there anything to know about failure beyond not punishing those who fail? | July 2001 |
| I know that innovation is naturally chaotic, but can’t we anticipate problems better? | June 2001 |
| What are some day-to-day tools for dealing with project risk? | April 2000 |
| What is the essence of managing risk in a development project? | October 1999 |
| Project Risk Management: A Proactive Approach | Article |
Teams | |
| What drives – or should drive – our product development? | March 2008 |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by strengthening teams? | September 2006 |
| Our team doesn’t get much done as a team. What can we do? | July 2003 |
| When co-locating our team isn’t practical, what can we do? | January 2003 |
| How can I break out of the e-mail vortex? | December 2002 |
| We call ourselves a team, but we don’t act like one. What can we do? | October 2002 |
| How can we get teams to use our product development process? | July 2002 |
| Haven’t virtual development teams superseded co-located ones? | March 2000 |
| What can I do to start dedicating people full-time to one project? | April 1999 |
| Why is it so destructive to split developers between projects? | March 1999 |
| How can our cross-functional team make decisions that stick? | December 2001 |
Tools | |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by exploiting set-based design? | July 2006 |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by exploiting experimentation? | June 2006 |
| How can I develop products more flexibly by exploiting product architecture? | April 2006 |
| Where do we start in reducing time to market? | July 2004 |
| How should we incorporate technology tools into our development process? | December 2003 |
| Do “rapid” prototypes really speed up product development? | September 2003 |
| How can we really benefit from rapid prototyping? | June 2000 |
Trends | |
| What is “green” product development? | January 2006 |
| What is lean product development? | December 2005 |
| How can we take advantage of globalization’s product development opportunities? | October 2005 |
| What if time-to-market doesn’t completely satisfy our objectives? | March 2005 |
| What is lean product development and should we be using it? | September 2004 |
| What major trends do your see in product development? | June 2004 |
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| * Stage-Gate® is a registered trademark of the Product Development Institute Inc. | |
| (c) Copyright 2013 Preston G. Smith. All Rights Reserved. |
