How do we manage priorities and timings and monitor risks as they change during the development process?
The Product Development Milestones decision area establishes milestones, manages and adjusts priorities and timings, and monitors risks as they change. Many companies follow a five-stage process: preliminary assessment, definition (market), development (product/cost), validation and commercialization.
Measuring performance milestones is critical. Regular planning and gap analysis reviews also anchor the development process with business priorities. Without this focus and monitoring, the process may be sidelined by day-to-day concerns. It is critically important to achieve all phases of the process. Information that focuses and fine-tunes each stage, and provides incentives, is critical to successful product launches.
With the Product Development Milestones decision area, you can set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for these elements:
- Product development cost and lead time ($ and #).
- Project completion by milestone (# and %).
- New initiatives (#).
- New product launch failures (#).
- Project duration (# and %).
Most importantly, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions to find the hidden gems in the data behind performance management:
- Fiscal month / year.
- Product line.
- Project team and start / completion date.
- Product development milestone.
Using the Product Development Milestones decision area
You set targets based on your goals and metrics in Product Development Milestones. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your objectives. Further, you dive into your results to see what underpins performance management.
- Product development cost ($): What is the scale of the identified opportunity? What are the risks and potential rewards?
- New initiatives (#): What new product development ideas do we have?
- New product launch failures ($): How many projects didn’t reach the market? What were the main reasons for their failure?
