NPD Management Corner

Know What’s Holding Back New Product Productivity

Are your teams striving to be better while the end business results indicate little change? Even with activities providing every appearance of improvement actions, there is a troubling factor with results. The expected change may never materialize, or more often the measurement criterion fails miserably at assessing true business success. Open-ended requirements, misguided success guidelines and misplaced assumptions lay the groundwork for an expensive initiative that provides little or no actual improvement to the product release cycle. Keep in mind the natural stability point for any organization is to keep things as they are.

To be fair this is not necessarily an intentional act, it is the status quo powers at work that strive to keep things in balance, a point where things remain comfortably the same. If you don’t believe this is at work in your organization review some of the past less successful initiatives, paying particular attention to success measurement. They were not likely tied to a solid contribution to top line revenue generation or bottom line costs, providing little motivation to move out of the comfort zone. Noticeable results will require noticeable change.

A truly successful endeavor must have a measurable impact on money. Criteria that flaunt a win based on local success within an organization silo should be a warning sign that the net benefit for the business may be non-existent. Limited measurement scope such as this leaves an organization susceptible to terminal sameness, a disease that quietly stymies advancement in new product development efforts.

Make no mistake – Any person will subconsciously strive to maintain the workflow as it is. Sure, there will be plenty of participation and ideas for change going on where others are concerned, thus keeping the workflow focus elsewhere. Ask anyone how new product execution is going and see where the focal point of the discussion goes. Isn’t it ironic that people and organizational silos actually have been granted the ability to grade them selves on productivity? If positive changes in execution are expected, self-assessment of efficiency has no place in the equation, period. A self-evaluation approach is an incestuous path to guaranteeing terminal sameness!

So I have to ask, is new product execution productivity OK or does it need work? Lip service tells me that it needs work, while actions tell me that it is OK. Are you supporting terminal sameness or are you supporting continuous improvement? There are powers at work to ensure nothing significant changes and you hold the key to weakening its grasp on your organization. Stir the pot and drive greater improvement value by measuring against only money and eliminate internally generated productivity assessments; it is a leadership choice.