product development

Product, project, and engineering development today are more than just designing features and functions. Customers across the global spectrum expect fantastic service to be fully satisfied with a product purchase. Moreover, in many instances, in product, project, and engineering management, our only product is a service.

Superior service doesn’t happen by accident. Organizations need to consider a service design strategy and train employees on acceptable behaviors to deliver consistent customer service experiences. WE can borrow the ideas from “Woo, Wow, and Win” by Thomas Stewart and Patricia O’Connell to name three important elements of exceptional service design:

Every customer is not right,
Customer service should be consistent, and
You’re never done.

Every Customer is Not Right

We’ve all heard the old adage that “the customer is always right.” Innovation for service must recognize the fallacy of this statement. First, we know that we do not design products and services for all customers. We develop new products and undertake engineering projects for a specific target audience. Not all customers are right for every organization and certainly customers are not always right.

The latter point is especially relevant as a firm scales its product and service offering from niche, early adopters to a majority market. Features and functionalities desired by an early user can be more complex and less refined than those necessary to be successful in a mass market. Firms need to utilize feedback from early adopters to initially develop a new product, yet the design must be streamlined for cost-effective manufacturing as the product transitions to the mainstream. The initial customers might be “right” to want you to add advanced technology to their product, but they may no longer be the “right” customers.

Customer Service Should Be Consistent

Consider the last time you stayed at a really nice, luxury hotel. The lobby shines and the staff are formally dressed, offering polite comments as you check in and transfer your luggage to your suite. The room itself may be quite plush with thick carpet and fluffy pillows. Bath products include aromatherapy scents to relax and calm you after a long day.

Yet, you’d also like to get an ice-cold soda so you consult the (faux?) leather-bound guide book on the desk. Ugh! The ice machine is on another floor, all the way down the hall. The soda and candy machines are on another, different floor and the room is barren, noisy, and dirty. Your shoes stick to the floor where someone has obviously spilled something and the trash can is overflowing. The ambiance is ruined.

Organizations need to provide a reliable, consistent customer service experience. One way to ensure that service delivery is predictable is to use the service yourself. Managers should go shopping at their retail outlets to understand and empathize with an ordinary customer. The service experience should be consistent through all levels of the company.

Employees across the board should be trained to understand the service experience and the overall standards expected in the business. Nothing should be outside of anyone’s job. Front desk clerks should tour the hotel to check for consistent “messaging”. If trash left in the hotel lobby is unacceptable, a dirty snack and ice room or guest laundry room is also unacceptable. Each employee must also be empowered to make decisions (within the bounds of a set of standards and guidelines) that ensure a consistent, reliable, and satisfying customer experience for all.

You’re Never Done

One of my favorite philosophies of quality management is “kaizen,” or the idea that you must continuously strive to improve. This is more than true in customer service design! Especially in a world of social media, customer service matters.

A company that can provide consistent and reliable customer service will excel ahead of its competitors. But the race never ends. Consumers expect more and your competitors will add features and services to try to gain market share.

Companies must continually benchmark against their top industry competitors to maintain exceptional service standards. The best firms will also benchmark and study top firms in other industries to learn what works best. For years, REI (a sporting goods cooperative) has taken returns with no questions asked. Zappos, a relatively new online shoe retailer, learned from this policy and offers shoe returns with no questions asked.

You’re never done and translating a customer experience success from one industry to another can keep your firm ahead of the competition.

Service Design Principles

Product, project, and engineering managers today are faced with satisfying a more selective and differentiating group of customers than ever. Features and technology functions will only get you so far. Service can make the difference to fully satisfy customer expectations and to lead the competition. Exceptional service is built on choosing the right customers, delivering consistent and reliable service, and recognizing that you’re never done.

You can learn more about service design and strategy in an NPDP workshop where we discuss specific marketing tools and techniques for new product development. Contact me at info@Simple-PDH.com or 281-280-8717 to enroll in a free NPDP overview course or any of our newly scheduled PMP, Scrum, or NPDP workshops in Houston as well as our online PDH courses. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

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Both New Product Development Professionals (NPDP) and Professional Engineering Managers (PEM) are tasked with transforming ideas into commercial realities. In many instances, hope is the main tool deployed to make the transition – we hope to make the technology work and we hope to hit the delivery date. We hope that customer will buy lots and lots of the product and we hope to reap huge profits as a reward.

I am personally a big believer in hoping for the best but as we’ve been taught, we should also add preparation to out toolkit. A positive attitude goes a long way but should be accompanied by a systematic approach to convert those great ideas into marketable products and services. One approach that NPDPs and PEMs can use to transform creative ideas into tangible goods is Integrated Product Development (IPD).

History of IPD

IPD is a waterfall process based on cross-functional, multi-disciplinary approach to product development. In fact, “integrated” means just that – an integrated team and an integrated life cycle perspective of the development program.

For reference, IPD has its roots in software development from the last century. In the 1970s, waterfall processes were commonly used to create code that powered PCs and other computers. A waterfall process is so named because work flows from one level to the next, just as a stream cascades over rocks and ledges to reach its destination.

A typical waterfall process includes the following steps:

Requirements development;
Design specifications based on requirements;
Implementing or writing and structuring of the actual code;
Verification that the product (software code) meets customer expectations; and
Maintenance to identify bug fixes and improvements.

Concurrent Engineering

Another key concept in IPD comes from the principle of concurrent engineering. In unenlightened times, R&D folks would develop a new technology and then hand-off that technology to an engineering team. The engineering team would study the technology and scale it up to production levels. Then, the engineering team would hand-off the full-scale engineering design to a construction team to build the factory. Upon completion of the factory, operations would begin start-up of the plant to eventually manufacture the product.

Not surprisingly, hand-offs between the teams were incomplete and both data and knowledge were lost in the transitions. Sometimes the transitions were so poor that the next internal customer had to rework the technology and design completely. Naturally, all of these hand-offs and rework cycles created delays and added cost to the final product.

The concept of concurrent engineering grew in the aerospace industry in the 1990s in order to improve quality and time-to-market. Concurrent engineering describes a systematic approach to new product development (NPD) in which multi-disciplinary teams work together, from start to finish, on the product. There are no hand-offs between functional departments because the work is integrated. Manufacturing and support organizations participate in product conceptualization and design specification. Furthermore, the entire product life cycle is examined during development as a part of concurrent engineering (design, manufacturability, reliability, and disposal).

Example IPD System

An example of an IPD system is Intel’s Product Development Framework which is applied across the corporation (“Making the Product Development Framework” by CR Galluzo and Deanna Bolton, 2011). Here the IPD system involves four steps, each of which include appropriate milestones and approvals.

Exploration
Planning
Development
Production

Another example of an IPD system, familiar to PEMs, is systems engineering which involves multi-disciplinary teams determining customer requirements upfront and following a structured development process.

The Basics of IPD

Integrated Product Development (IPD) is contrasted with serial development processes in which project hand-offs occur during the project life cycle. IPD is a water process in that specific stages of work must be completed before the next stage of work is initiated. While serial development can be successful for lengthy and complex projects, integrated teams and concurrent engineering aid in developing products with shorter life cycles and lower cost of investment.

To learn more about IPD, please join us for an NPDP workshop where we discuss several alternative processes for developing new products including serial and integrated teams, waterfall and Agile approaches. Contact me at info@Simple-PDH.com or 281-280-8717 to enroll in a free NPDP overview course or any of our newly scheduled PMP, Scrum, or NPDP workshops in Houston as well as our online PDH courses. At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications. You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!