The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

12.4. Time-To-Market Tools and Techniques

This section is a survey of the tools, techniques, and approaches for shortening development cycle time. Many of these are covered in greater detail in other chapters, and the references at the end of this chapter provide added detail. The other chapters and references are often aimed at objectives other than cycle time, however, so please adjust the tools to gain significant cycle time benefit. For example, the first group below, Process Control Approaches, is often focused on ensuring that all steps of the process are completed with the objective of maximizing the product's marketability. This is a laudable goal, but you may find there are certain steps that contribute more to cycle time than to product marketability, so your objective may suggest cutting out or adjusting these steps. However, you do so in concert with other parts of the organization, realizing the costs and benefits of these steps. Furthermore, you may decide not to cut out these steps from your next project, because the costs and benefits associated with them differ for the next project.

An important and popular technique is redesigning your development process, mainly by overlapping activities; see Smith and Reinertsen (1998, Chapter 9) for details. In contrast, the other techniques listed below are often not so obvious.

12.4.1. Process Control Approaches

Most organizations that regularly develop products now have some sort of a phased development process, such as ...