Eleven Guidelines To Keep Your New Product and Service Devepment Projects on Target
Want to radically change your organization? Learn the skills it takes to develop a new product and service development model to keep all your product development activities on target. What’s a new product and service development model? It’s a tool that outlines what management has agreed upon as to the methodical processes for everyone to follow to insure predictable reliable results while growing an organization.
When building the model, there are many guidelines including these eleven that would insure you’re on target.
1. You are on target if your process can be used over and over again. That’s not to say you can’t build a model for a one-time use; it’s just that good models have staying power.
2. You are on target if your process has an idea/discovery generation component. In order to be “unique,” creative managers believe this part can be skipped. It can’t.
3. You are on target if your company establishes an Idea Bank with a mechanism to collect ideas throughout the organization.
4. You are on target if you’ve placed the voice of the customer in the mix throughout the model from idea generation through launch. The more and the earlier you’re in contact with the potential customer/client, the more you’ll be focused on customer centric ideas.
5. You are on target if you place go-kill points throughout the system. Go-Kill points enable management to make pre determined parameters for those who work the system to keep on target. Good go-kill points also create an environment to stop a project without going too far into the new product development process.
6. You are on target if you’ve taken the time to put senior management into the creation of the process.
7. You are on target if you’ve attempted to outline the process to others in the firm before you start the process. This includes talking to all department heads that may be impacted.
8. You are on target if you consider parallel processing of ideas during the new product development process. A powerful part of building a model is you now have the ability to bring in all the other departments to insure you are on target early on. For example, if you go ahead with a product, sales and marketing can start their needed aid while the product is being generated as a prototype and while it’s being tested. In this way, they too get a jump on creating the best sales tools and processes.
9. You are on target if your process generates solutions that meet overall corporate goals and objectives.
10. You are on target if you stayed in a strategic mode thinking about the process long enough to make a solid model for future use. If you jump to tactical, you’ve already missed the point.
11. You are on target if you’ve tested your own model.
The reason for building a new product and service development model is to increase the odds of your organization generating great products and services the first time around. It requires time and thought to insure this happens.