Are you providing for your product design teams success?
Do you believe that since your design team has all the tools they need and you have formal program management in place they have what they need to be successful? Designers are dreamers and creators by nature and that must be fostered. They key to getting the most from your team is funneling the creativity into specific deliverables to meet your business needs. Design tools will not provide this focus and program management is far too removed from the design details. You must create processes within design for managing the details of design execution to augment what your formal design tools provide.
Chandler, AZ April 11, 2005 -- You want your design team to be a creative, allowing innovative new products to fill you product portfolio. You also want then to execute to the plan to bring these innovative products to market per the plan. The mix of a highly creative nature rolled in with skills to execute to plan does not come naturally to a team. What tends to happen is we assume that tools and program management cover the execution details while allowing the creative nature of the team to flow. This assumption is rarely valid. You must explicitly stimulate the teams execution skills.
Design tools will not manage all of design processes and program management does not offer the depth into the design details to be affective in the particulars. You must manage the design from within, concentrating on the details of interactions and deliverables between designers and the design teams external customers such as test, product and marketing functions. The processes to manage the design execution are your tools" and they must be developed within the design team. Examples of these process tools would include travelers, checklists, engineering specification content, team meetings, specification change management, best practices, lessons learned, review procedures and specification closure procedures.
The key in development of these tools for managing your design process is that it is joint effort between the design team, test, product engineering and program management. Everyone on the product development team has needs and the entire team must reach consensus on who is doing what and the specific deliverables of each step. Consensus first followed up by the necessary documentation tools" to confirm the plan. Ferret out any issues, get them on the table, address them and build up your tools to remove them as a continuing issue. Do not assume that the formal design tools are managing all the details of your entire design process.
About Jorvig Consulting, Inc.
Jorvig Consulting provides services to enhance product design team processes. Their main goal is allowing the team freedom from surprises during execution. http://www.jorvigconsulting.com
Contact Information:
Jeff Jorvig at 480-895-0478, jeff@jorvigconsulting.com
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