Posts by Rob Allen

In my previous article, we reviewed the project approval committee, and emphasized approval to start projects and/or approve projects in-process. With any type of project oversight, presentations or project schedules are often reviewed. For a more lean project management approach it would help to consider reviewing the actual deliverables, including a mutual understanding of the “definition of…

Many companies pursue a product development strategy that provides a product (or service) which meets customer needs sooner (rather than later), and then makes adjustments after the product has been fielded. Pursuing this approach means accepting the associated risks.  What if a critical to quality or critical to reliability characteristic fails to meet customer needs?…

In a previous article, we explored agile product development with a focus on early product validation. There are additional key enablers from agile/scrum that can be borrowed and applied to any product development process, however. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the role & responsibility for scrum masters vs. project managers/core team leaders. Let’s start…

In a previous article we compared and contrasted the role & responsibility for a scrum master vs. project manager/core team leader (CTL/PM). In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the scrum product owner role and compare it with the product development team’s “opportunity champion”. So what is the scrum product owner and the corresponding agile/scrum process?  The product owner…

All projects or programs have a formal or informal resource management process, with the goal of completing projects on time, within budget and with good project quality. In order to meet this goal, the resource management objectives are: the quantity of estimated resources is accurate the resource role requirements are clear and precise the resources…

In this weeks article, we’ll explore how the three disciplines (product development, process improvement and project management) can enable change management. First, it’s worth reflecting on how these disciplines fit together.  Starting with product development our goal is to understand customer value, and to optimize the product (or service) by maximizing customer value and minimizing…

In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the definition of a requirement, with a ‘story’, which is used in agile/scrum. Both requirements and stories establish a clear understanding of customer needs in the context of desired functionality. The framework for each is somewhat different, however. Recall the definition of a requirement: …a requirement defines “what…

For the majority of organizations, long-term success is tied directly to the new product development process. Tomorrow’s revenue and growth are tightly bound to how successful you are at launching new products. Offering genuinely valuable, high quality products is, more than ever, the best way to capture market share.  Also, more investment up-front minimizes overall…

In a previous article, we defined design for six sigma (DFSS) as a thought process focused on maximizing customer value and minimizing cost. More specifically, DFSS is used to reduce variability in product performance (thereby increasing value), using analytical models and our knowledge of manufacturing variability to enable specification limits on difficult-to-manufacture tolerances to be increased…

Previous articles have covered product development tools and methodologies such as lean product development, agile, design for six sigma, product life cycle (PLC) and project management processes. In this article, lets consider “the product” being developed any hardware product, software, IT system, service or new business process.  We’ll use the acronym “PSSBP” (Product, Service, Software, Business Process) as an…