The Art of Scheduling
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Schedules get a bad rap. Here’s an alternative view point…
Read MoreProvisioning Host
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Understanding how organizations provision development teams (i.e. provide necessary people, funding, information, facilities, resources, knowledge, skills, etc.) has been a foundational practice in our research work.
Read MoreWhat is the Host?
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The “Host” is everything in an organization that is outside and around a team. The host can provision a team or it can interrupt it. Fast organizations design the host to "provide for" when resources, information, or "things" are needed by the team to be effective.
Read MoreDifferentiating Customer Needs from Product Features
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Often product functions or features are confused with customer needs. In our world a customer need (also called "customer requirement") is an attribute that expresses some part of problem a customer is trying to solve. A product feature is specifically how the customer's need will be fulfilled. A product feature is also called a "how."
Read MoreManaging Your Business During the Bad Times
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During a recession, it can be difficult to manage your business effectively when things are in a spiral. This post describes how to select which projects to keep given your constraints.
Read MoreIncrease Product Success
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Increase your new product success rate by finding the root causes of poor performance and translating these into selection criteria to pick better products (to develop). This process also uncovers issues that are causing the wrong products to be defined in the first place. Better failure analysis, i.e. why do some new products miss their targets?, can be translated into better new product selection criteria so that more good ideas get into the development pipeline than bad ones.
Read MoreEinstein's Quotes
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The late great Albert Einstein came up with some memorable quotes. Here are just some that ring true with us every day.
Read MoreRight Product... 80% of Future Product Success
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The Right Product is the one that precisely meets the Right Customer’s product requirements. But determining those requirements and translating them into product specifications is a complex process, and businesses don’t always put in enough effort.
Focus... Get Right Customer
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Highly successful companies base their business plans on the market. They study market segments and carefully choose which ones to compete in, looking for the most suitable dominant Tier 1 customer in a particular segment—the Right Customer.
Read MoreBest Practice Software Development
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Practicing what we preach. Here we describe the development practices we use to implement our own software tools.
Read MoreEvolution of a Development Project
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A walk through observations of how a new product development project evolves. We’ve observed three distinct phases; gestation of an idea, creation of the product, and overrun. Overrun should not be a phase, but by default it has become a default part of development, as a result of poor planning.
Read MoreFast Autonomous Teams
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Steven Wheelwright (HBS) described four types of product development team structures; 1) functional hierarchy, 2) lightweight, 3) heavyweight, and 4) autonomous. We’ve added speed and accountability to his model.
Read MoreManaged Consensus
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The problem with "consensus management" involving many stakeholders, is that it takes a long time; and the quality of the decision is typically low due to the duration of the process, the unstructured nature of the process, and the necessary compromises that reduce things to the lowest common denominator.
Read MoreThe Duration Game
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Why break-down long duration activities that fall within the near-term planning window (i.e. next 2 months)? Following, is a discussion of why this is important and how best practice teams do it. Call it “the duration game” because it is one of the most common games we see played out between those that manage and those that do. We know you’ve seen this next example on your last project.
Read MoreAccelerate Pain
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High Performers… Rather than delay “pain,” they accelerate the threshold and force issues out early, rather than avoid them, delaying confrontation. They knew that when confronted early, they were afforded more time to fix the problems. This “early schedule” or before-the-fact behavior is a core characteristic of these high performers. We’ve also seen the concept extended to create corporate cultures that rewards before-the-fact action.
Read MoreAccelerate... Finish On Time
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You have to accelerate the schedule in order to be on time. In other words, you need to pull-in the schedule just to be able to meet the committed target date. This is called "time banking." You accelerate to gain time now, since you know unexpected things will happen in the future, where you will need to use that banked time. What is certain, is uncertainty! Only a fool assumes a plan will materialize as planned.
Read MoreControl Systems Don't Generate Speed
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Control versus Speed; control systems don't generate speed. In fact, we know from fast organizations the opposite to be true. Then one would think that less control would be fast, like in a start-up which has very low management overhead.
Read MoreThe Challenge Game
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The underlying concept is to track schedule trends and use the movement to predict future events and/or to generate energy today to influence the future. Challenge Targets are the most aggressive form of a schedule goal. Many times, Target Dates are confused with the “real” schedule. The Target Date is when something is “wanted,” but this is not always when it will be delivered. Knowing the gap between when it is wanted and when it can be delivered is one of the key factors that differentiated fast teams from the norm.
Read MoreBreakthroughs by Challenging Assumptions
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We use a process called Challenge to facilitate breakthroughs in thinking with teams, such as accelerating a schedule or finding a way to reduce costs in a system.
Read MoreManage Complete Innovation Life Cycle
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In the technology business, growth comes from new products that satisfy the customer. New product innovation is the key to growth, be it in mature segments when taking share from competitors or in growing markets where time-to-market is the driver. We work with clients to create a customer-focused culture to produce the right products at the right time.
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