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Study: Speed to Market
Pittiglio
Rabin Todd McGrath (PRTM) has produced a product development benchmarking study for the
aerospace and defense industries. The study covers a number of items, but buried inside it
is the following.
"While the industry continues to lag the time to market performance of commercial
segments, top industry performers speed comparably complex projects to completion twice as
fast as their peers."
WALLY'S COMMENT ... This is a law of nature. No matter what dimension you look at, in
whatever industry you choose, the top performers out perform the vast majority of players,
not by one or two percent, but by hundreds or thousands of percent. How might that happen
in product development?
The most important "technology" here is probably the soft technology of
management. You have to recruit, train, and develop the kinds of people who can put
together project teams of high value and performance quickly.
You have to create a culture that rewards team work and team achievement as well as the
kind of frenetic energy that goes with high-production teams.
You need to have a management culture that guides when necessary, but gets the heck out
of the way when necessary.
Those are the soft technology items. There are also "hard technology" items.
Intranets, and 24-hour rotating project teams can speed operations dramatically.
Researchers, designers, and front-line people can use email, chat, and technology such
as Lotus' Team Room to chop product and project development times by two thirds and more.
Getting the design and basic product done are only half the game. The other half has to
do with getting things produced and into service. Hard technology can help here as well.
At Hewlett Packard, I found full manufacturing specifications posted on internal Web sites
for plants around the world to grab as they need it. They were notified of the
availability of new specs and production standards via electronic mail. The information
they were able to pick up included code necessary for reprogramming machines and assembly
lines. What was all that worth? In one example, time to market in a particular industry
was estimated at a million dollars a day in competetive advantage. The development and
roll out use of the hard and soft technologies we talked about generated 10-14 days of
advantage in that industry, with each roll out.
This material originally appeared in May 1998.
Reviewed: 2/15/03
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