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Case Studies
Redesign
of a manufacturing division
Redesign of a bank division
Resolving
conflicting objectives in an IS group
Designing a consulting division
New product introduction redesign
Implementing a new performance management
system
Managing the development needs of 1000 consultants
Rollout of proprietary training
A review of an existing rewards and motivation
system
Case Studies | New product introduction redesign
The client in this case designed and produced electronic systems for automotive and aerospace control applications. They had manufacturing activities on two sites and design staff working at a further three sites. The company was part of an international group which had identified product introduction as a problem at a corporate level and a particular priority for this division. Their ability to develop new products quickly, to an agreed specification, timescale and cost was vital to their survival.
I was engaged, along with a group of colleagues, to carry out a comprehensive review and redesign of new product introduction activities which involved more than 500 engineers working on upwards of 40 major projects. The engineers were organised into departments according to their specialist expertise: electronic design, mechanical design, software design etc. Responsibility for planning and managing projects lay with Project Managers. Department heads set technical guidelines, but also allocated work within the department on a day to day basis.
Unfortunately many projects ran late, consumed significantly more resource than planned, and suffered from technical problems at the integration stage when the work of the departments was brought together. Project managers were frustrated that they often did not know which of the department staff were working on their projects, and that they were rarely able to bring them together to discuss integration issues. Other issues identified were a lack of shared understanding of the overall process and standards, and much time lost 'reinventing the wheel'.
Our first step was to form a team drawn from across the company so that the different roles involved in product introduction were represented. Next we held a series of workshops to develop a shared understanding of the product introduction process. Then we came up with a new approach to organising around projects, where the key engineers would be seconded to the project managers for the duration of their involvement. This would mean the end of working on several projects in parallel, which some enjoyed, but the start of a new era of improved communication and collaboration between the different specialisms involved in each project.
At this point it became clear that although the majority of the engineers welcomed the proposed approach, some of the department heads did not. They were concerned that engineers would lose proficiency if they weren't sitting next to colleagues of the same discipline. They also felt they were losing a significant part of their role and power. The debate rumbled back and forth across the boardroom for several weeks. We developed the proposal further and showed that department heads would play an important role in the allocation of engineers to projects, and in ensuring technical standards were maintained.
It took a while before the department heads were prepared to sign up to the new approach, but we were able to make progress on other areas in the meantime. We helped the engineers and the project managers to group the projects so that there would be maximum opportunity for reading elements of development work across from one project to the next; we designed a stripped-down version of the process for simple, fast-track projects and we defined the key responsibilities for the different roles involved in development projects.
In the end even the department heads had to admit that
the project had addressed the issues that were hampering product introduction,
and that although they had anticipated resistance to change, they had
not expected to be the main source of it.
