New Product Development Consulting
OpLaunch shapes new product development success through consulting by helping leaders and individual contributors improve how they:
- Recognize the efficacious from the inefficient in their new product development (NPD) context
- Evolve answers to "How do I do more with less?" inquiries
- Facilitate ways to close the innovation gap (the delay between wanting to develop a new product and delivering it)
- Mobilize a network of contributors with a diverse set of characteristics [such as domain speciality, skill level, organizational affiliation, geography, and project engagement parameters (such as when they are contributing, the percentage of their time devoted to the project, interest level (passionate to apathetic), ...)] to a cohesive project vision.
- Promote the functionally significant factors that increase the differential rate of success in NPD
- Differentiate causal principles of NPD success from correlations to success
- Identify their unique competitive advantages related to development and capitalize on them
- Reduce new product development risk by minimizing fog, antagonism, and waste.
Our recommendations tend to address issues related to improving value throughout development, reducing waste, improving team situation models, and increasing synergism.
Promoting activities that improve value
Typically, new product development activities produce value and proxies for value (or proxy variables).
Customers are one of the primary arbitrators of value that results from a new product development efforts. Customers define value on their terms.
The development network value items such as learning and mastering new skills, making new professional connections in diverse disciplines, and enhancing their professional reputation by delivering an extraordinary solution.
Examples of proxies for value include:
- Number of lines of code
- Meeting internal milestones
- Selection of internal frameworks such a Stage-Gate, lean, Kanban, or design thinking
- Forecasts and other estimates
- Working on obsolete requirements
Our recommendations tend to include strategies related to the disintermediation of information within the NPD network. This facilitates the identification of unvalidated inputs.
Reducing disciplinary sequencing
Disciplinary sequencing delays are produced when one group waits for the output of another group. During development, common delays may be include:
- Designers wait for a requirements document
- Engineers and programmers wait for designers
- Testers wait for engineers and programmers
- Marketing waits for engineers and programmers to 'finalize' the product
Problems related to disciplinary sequencing are a root cause of unsuccessful and stressful product launch.
Our recommendations tend to include methods to reduce communication overhead and reduce information asymmetry within NPD networks.
Embracing the system view and the component view
The principles that facilitate NPD success utilize but also subsume the principles of the individual contributing disciplines (such as engineering, programming, and marketing).
Our recommendations are likely to include insights on improving team situation models. Our Launch Architecture Services provide domain specialists and other developers a framework to focus their efforts.
Increasing synergy. Reducing antagonism
Synergism (synergy) is an NPD network is the joint action of individual contributors that taken together increase each other's effectiveness.
Synergy is "the bonus that is achieved when things work together harmoniously." - Mark Twain
In contrast, antagonism is an active opposition between individual contributors or functional groups that decrease the effectiveness of at least one of them.
Our recommendations are built upon our NPDI (new product development interface) concepts to transform from the apathy of antagonistic silos to functional complementaries.
Contact OpLaunch to shape your new product development success through consulting
To inquire about specific ways to improve your new product or service development results through consulting, contact OpLaunch.
