Class: PM 101: Product Management Essentials Workshop
City: New York City
Date: July 9 - 10, 2013
Class: PM 101: Product Management Essentials Workshop
City: Waltham, MA
Date: August 6 - 7, 2013
Class: PM 202: Managing the Product Life Cycle A Workshop for Managing Current Products & Portfolios
City: New York City
Date: August 20 - 21, 2013
Meeting Launch Date Targets: Beyond the Stage-Gate Process by Scott Wiley
Introduction
While the stage gate process yields a specification-compliant product, it can be insufficient for keeping projects on track for on-time delivery.
The Story
At any given point, we had between 50 and 100 NPD projects in development across multiple businesses. Although we had a sophisticated stage-gate process in place, we found that many of our projects were missing their targeted launch dates. Since the projects averaged between nine and 24 months in duration, it might take several months before we detected a delay through the established stage-gate process. By that time, it was often too late to correct course in order to completely recover. We decided to implement a modified process to address this deficiency.
The first step was to develop a simple measurement that captured overall team performance in the area of on-time delivery. The measure that we developed was "Schedule Efficiency" (SE). We calculated the measurement as number of months of Planned Development (PD) divided by number of months of Actual Development (AD). (i.e. SE = Mo PD / Mo AD). In applying this measurement, we found that our overall historical SE across more than one hundred launched NPD projects averaged 76%. We knew we could do better.
We asked all the teams to produce a high-level Gantt chart indicating their stage-gate milestone goals at the point of submitting their preliminary funding request for the projects — prior to the first stage-gate reviews. We tracked these date milestones in a database, and set up an NPD review mechanism distinctly separate from our stage-gate reviews.
While the stage-gate reviews would go narrow and deep into a particular project, this new mechanism would stay shallow but touch on the status of every project under development. We conducted this review each month. Either the project was "on time" towards hitting the next milestone or it was not. If there were a problem, the team was encouraged to describe it and recommend a solution at this meeting. Where the leadership could take a simple action during this review mechanism to get the team back on track, we would. If the problem were more in-depth, we would schedule a separate mitigation day to drill deeper the following week, and we would move on to reviewing the next projects. In this way, the new process became a forcing function that required the teams realistically to assess their progress on a monthly basis. We were able to detect projects "at risk" much earlier. After a little more than a year of implementation, we improved our Schedule-Efficiency (SE) to 92%.
What I Learned
The stage-gate process is essential to product development, but it is not sufficient for all tasks.
Establishing a measurement gave us a starting point and a sense of accomplishment as we began to make progress.
We needed to permit the teams to update their preliminary stage-gate milestones at the point of project commitment. After that, there was no further adjustment allowed.
