An enormous gulf can exist between knowing what you need to do and doing it effectively. The part of PDC's practice that encompasses efficient product development helps with the nuts and bolts of bringing your product or service to market: implementing quickly, institutionalizing change, creating and managing the product development process, and avoiding risk.
Accelerated Implementation Model (AIM®)
Training and pilot programs designed to introduce positive change often fail to give you the long-term results you need. PDC's Accelerated Implementation Model (AIM) is a rapid and measurable methodology that turns improvement strategies into organizational habits.
Too often, companies that invest considerable time, money, and resources in discovering the processes, methods, and skills needed to improve their bottom line find themselves stumbling around with pilot projects and training programs. Despite initial success and fanfare, the improvement dies and change never ripples throughout the entire organization. Ignoring the middle step in change -- the time between discovery of a new way of doing business and the time when it is fully deployed as a habit -- prolongs the time to full deployment. PDC has developed a methodology to deploy change that is robust, quantifiable, and rapid.
AIM allows you to turn your discovered process improvements into habits that work across a broad range of subjects, organizations, and people. AIM focuses on outcome -- helping you deliver real work while making a change happen. Designed for repeatable success, AIM encompasses a new way of planning, executing, and measuring so you can institutionalize change and realize improvements through a series of workshops that help you:
- break down the improved process into discrete steps;
- define the potential workshops to address those steps;
- identify the critical few workshops where the change process may fail without intervention;
- develop custom workshops to address the weak spots;
- implement the workshop program at all levels in your organization; and
- measure the effectiveness of the change process.
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Change Management
Change is rarely easy. Companies may find change easy to initiate but difficult to sustain as organizations revert to old ways of doing things over time.
PDC has helped hundreds of companies improve the bottom line by transforming their approaches to strategy and development. Working collaboratively, we identify areas for improvement, help you gain company-wide consensus, and put in place the processes and metrics you need to instigate positive action. PDC's experienced team helps your organization
- overcome resistance to change,
- break through uncomfortable early stages of turning improvements into habits, and
- eliminate the old habits that impede growth. (See the section on AIM.)
Through a combination of proprietary approaches, tools, and data (see our Assessment practice area) we help you achieve a 360-degree view of both internal and external factors that affect performance. Then we drill deep to get at the root causes of problems. By combining our real-world experience in product development and best practices insights with knowledge of your organization, we guide you through identifying and implementing the most vital few changes that will have long-lasting and measurable impact.
Clients such as Abbott Laboratories, Apple Computer, Bose, Compaq Computer, Parametric Technologies, DataCard, Eaton, Siemens, Medrad, and Teradyne have benefited from this straightforward, uncomplicated approach to change management. Regardless of how complex and overpowering the issues may seem, PDC can help you manage changes that have deep long-lasting results.
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Product Development Process
Collaboration can greatly enrich the product development process, yet with everyone working together it's easy to lose site of high-risk issues. PDC's Product Development Process (PDP) practice helps companies effectively balance resources and risk to optimize product development.
Taking the lead from supply chain management, we teach you how to engage in just-in-time product development. We prompt you to develop the riskiest and longest lead-time features first and postpone low-risk customized ones until later in the project.
PDC's PDP approach goes beyond the traditional and often inflexible stages and gates review. Our approach is a flexible process approach that is designed to optimize development through phase reviews that reduce bottlenecks and waste. We take you beyond the traditional stages and gates approach with a flexible yet methodical process to optimize product development and ensure that cross-functional teams work together to leverage their knowledge inventory.
Key components of PDC's Product Development Process are:
- defining the development process model, including the terminology and identification of process phases;
- identifying the core groups, including product development participants and the management structure;
- articulating the development process phases, key documents, and activities for each phase; and
- assigning and agreeing upon the roles and responsibilities of all participants, including management.
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Project Management
You expend an enormous amount of effort ensuring the right strategy, focused vision, solid product road map, and a phases and gates process. Yet you may be overlooking a critical element that could impede or ensure the success of your effort: the project manager of a product development team.
The project manager needs to wear many hats -- leader, planner, scheduler, negotiator, taskmaster, and administrator. Some people are natural project managers and take on all these roles with ease. Others need some coaching. Project leaders can't be effective without buy-in at all levels on standardized skills and a definition of best practices for Project Management. Beyond frustrating the team, these deficiencies can reduce the efficiency of the entire organization, resulting in schedule slips, poor product quality, and unexpected costs and delays
PDC has instituted best practices in several organizations to ensure that every project has a knowledgeable project manager leading the team to get every project done right, on time, and on budget.
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Risk Avoidance
Uncertain times propagate and exacerbate risk. Customer preferences, the bureaucratic maze, organizational politics, conflict and tension, and a less-than-clear business climate all contribute to the doubtful nature of your revenue stream.
Most companies understand the benefits of assessing, managing, and monitoring opportunities and hazards against business, project, and organizational goals. You want to know: How can you avoid unknown risks? What can you do to make risks tangible and then take action to mitigate them?
The PDC approach, designed for busy executives and project teams, focuses on predictability and outcomes. We use both market- and capability-based data to characterize the risks that will influence your results. You can then apply this information to your planning and actions within days, not weeks.
We give you an alternative to the expensive and elaborate risk management approaches that most consulting firms offer. PDC works with executive and project teams to uncover the risks that lead to product development project and portfolio failure. PDC's systematic approach provides a complete view of risk on every aspect of a new product or business issue. We help you quantify the risk graphically and in a short period of time.
We offer a series of short, collaborative workshops - applied directly to a project seeking to generate a specific outcome - to uncover the best available knowledge about your market and your company's ability to perform. We apply a unique, visual method often giving you a numerical way of selecting among different approaches. Together, we avoid the specific risks associated with your product development investment, delivering the desired results and revenue stream.
