The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

1.3. Critical Success Factors—People and Environment

1.3.1. The Way Project Teams Are Organized

Product innovation is very much a team effort! Do a postmortem on any bungled new product project and invariably you'll find each functional area doing its own piece of the project, with very little communication between players and functions—a fiefdom mentality, and no real commitment of players to the project. Many studies concur that how the project team is organized and functions strongly influences project outcomes (Cooper, 2001). The APQC study finds that Best Performers organize their NPD project teams with the following elements (see Figure 1.3) (American Productivity & Quality Center, 2003; Cooper, 2003):

1. A clearly assigned team of players for each significant NPD project—people who are part of the project and do work for it: What is surprising is that this practice is not evident in almost all businesses today. But this is true: only 61.5 percent of businesses have clearly assigned teams for NPD, with Best Performing businesses outdoing the worst by two to one.

2. Cross-functional project teams, with team members from Technical, Saks, Marketing, Operations, and so on: This is a practice now embraced by the great majority of businesses. Here, team members are not just representatives of their function, but rather true members of the project team, shedding their functional loyalties and working together in an integrated fashion to common goal.

3. Cross-functional cooperation within ...