1996 Product Development Book Reviews

 

World-Class New Product Development: Benchmarking Best Practices of Agile Manufacturers, by Dan Dimancescu and Kemp Dwenger. New York: Amacom, 1996. 239 + xvi pages. $29.95.

This book covers leading-edge management practices in new product development. The authors draw from their experience working with many companies around the world that are leaders in product and process innovation. Although many familiar themes appear, such as development teams and voice of the customer, Dimancescu and Dwenger also introduce many tools likely to be new to the reader.

Their primary audience is managers who develop new products. The book concentrates on industrial products and consumer durables, mostly from higher tech and large companies. It applies to both hardware and software development, and much of it also is useful for service development. Many of the topics are advanced: the reader will find new tools and concepts in this book, but these may require further work to validate and apply.

Dimancescu and Dwenger bring to this volume rich experience that serves them well. Both have spent considerable time in Japan over several years observing innovation leaders there. They have similar but less extensive experience in Europe. In addition, they founded and are now leading the International Association for Product Development (IAPD), a private subscription group. Thus, this book is not based on primary research, and no research findings are provided. It is instead a collection of techniques the authors have discovered in their visits or encountered in IAPD meetings.

In Chapter 1, the authors start with a list of the predominant problems in developing new products:

1. Customer needs not well defined or understood

2. Errors found too late

3. Management by interference

4. Too many projects

5. Burnout

6. Poor communication

They highlight poor definition of customer needs as the most pervasive problem. Although Dimancescu and Dwenger support this point adequately-and much other current research also supports it-they provide a poor example to illustrate their point. The example involves a sound system developed for a personal computer, which followed stated customer desires closely by providing a pure sound, but the sound was so pure that it blurred the screen (p. 9). To this reviewer, this is an illustration of poor technical execution, not of poor customer need definition. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case of a poorly chosen example that weakens the point being made.

Chapters 5-13 are the core and most valuable part of the book. Each covers a group of tools that addresses the common problems listed above. On page 60 is a matrix that connects the problems listed above with the chapters that provide solutions. For example, Chapter 5, entitled "Strategic Process Teaming," covers development teams as a solution. Here the authors describe a three-tier team structure, citing examples such as Boeing, Chrysler, Ford, and Digital. The emphasis is clearly on large companies and large projects, so the techniques suggested will need adjustment for more modestly sized situations to retain an agile team environment.

Chapter 6 describes four-fields mapping, a tool that Dimancescu has brought from Japan. Basically, a four-fields map is a process map [1] with its horizontal and vertical axes interchanged and some additional useful information added in the margins. Such maps allow describing a development process on a single sheet in an easily grasped form.

The authors describe various approaches toward metrics in Chapter 7. A method they call half-life performance gaps is particularly intriguing. Much like manufacturing learning curve theory, the half-life method provides a trajectory that performance should follow to yield a 50% reduction in the gap over a certain predictable period, thus giving management a definite, achievable path toward improvement. Unfortunately, the authors do not describe how one predicts the period in a given situation, which is the key to making the technique useful. The reader is left with a reference to an unpublished manuscript on order fulfillment processes. This is an example of what I referred to earlier as a leading-edge tool that will need more work to be useful to product developers.

Chapter 8 covers development reviews; here the authors note a current trend toward using reviews to learn about not only the project but also the development process itself [2]. "Every review became an introspective session into why things were happening the way they were and not just whether the design met the requirement" (p. 107).

Product definition is the focus in Chapter 9, where the authors cite a study showing that 66% of development project failures stem from a weak understanding of user needs. The key solution is to get all members of the development team into direct contact with a small, select group of customers. As one team learned, "Stubborn as we were, our attitude began to change through the interviewing process. We heard comments on issues we'd never addressed before, and we learned that some of our assumptions had been faulty. If we hadn't heard it with our own ears, we never would have believed some of what we learned" (p. 130). Dimancescu and Dwenger offer a healthy perspective on quality function deployment (QFD): "QFD is not to be judged as a tool but as a communication process for development team members" (p. 126).

This reviewer found fewer useful tools from Chapter 10 on, but there are a couple of gems in the appendices. Appendix D provides two case studies illustrating how a company can work more effectively with its suppliers.

Because the payoff from anything in the book requires an organization to actually change the way it does business, the sobering reminder provided on the last page of the book should not be missed. Dwenger describes an NEC-GTE joint venture that attained breakthrough operational improvements, "but the learning opportunity was lost on other GTE-Sylvania manufacturing locations, which saw the accomplishment as a threat rather than as an opportunity, and patterns of behavior failed to change."

This book suffers from two flaws throughout: the copy editing is poor and many references cited are inaccessible. For example, IAPD presentations are often referenced, but these are available only to IAPD member companies.

Preston G. Smith

New Product Dynamics

References

1. Rummler, Geary A. and Brache, Alan P. Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1990.

2. Smith, Preston G. Your product development process demands ongoing improvement. Research-Technology Management 39(2):37-44 (March-April 1996).

(Reviewed in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, November 1996, pp. 567-568.)

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Product Juggernauts: How Companies Mobilize to Generate a Stream of Market Winners, Jean-Philippe Deschamps and P. Ranganath Nayak, (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1995), $29.95

Not long ago, companies considered product development a normal part of operations, managed by technical specialists, but otherwise no more compelling than managing accounts payable. Development was normally equated with R&D; top managers would say, "That is handled by our vice president of engineering." Today, leading companies consider their new-products capability to be a core competence, far too important to be trusted to a department of technical wizards. For them, development capability is the key to growth, even to survival.

This is a book about companies that take product development very seriously, and it presumes to tell us how they do it. Both authors are senior executives with Arthur D. Little. They have abundant experience in global technology management and the considerable resources to research and write this lengthy volume.

A key point appears in the subtitle: the measure of goodness in the discipline of product development is not an occasional bright star but a continuing flow of successes. 3M, for example, is not a master at innovation due to Post-Its, but because of the ancestors and offspring of Post-Its. The requirement is to build a mill that can churn out profitable products ceaselessly.

The core of the book is Chapters 3 through 7, and Chapter 9. Each of these chapters features a story of a company that is a master at a critical element of new-products success. Deschamps and Nayak tell the story and then explain the management principles they believe relate to this success. Unfortunately, the principles do not relate closely to the featured company. Thus, although the principles may be quite valid, they do not come across as essential tools. For example, Chapter 3 features Rubbermaid, and the capability featured is fomenting a customer revolution. However, in explaining Rubbermaid's approach, there are examples from 22 other companies, some as remote from Rubbermaid's business as Boeing, Bell Laboratories, and Mercedes-Benz.

Another featured company is Canon (Chapter 4), whose personal copier business illustrates the value of a company vision and product strategy. Toshiba's medical ultrasound business (Chapter 5) shows how a clear but not burdensome development process contributes to success. Honda's NSX sports car project (Chapter 6) emphasizes the importance of a strong program manager. Ford provides an example of dedicated development teams for its 1994 Mustang (Chapter 7). Chapter 9 covers the techniques of rapid product development, using a Philips television project as the example. In case you are wondering about Chapter 8, it treats the critical element of marshaling resources, for which the authors apparently could find no company to serve as an example of best practices.

Overall, the book provides a broad survey of contemporary best practices in product development. A surprising omission is lack of any mention of the excellent Arthur D. Little book on technology strategy, Third Generation R&D (Roussel, Saad, and Erickson, Harvard Business School Press; 1991), which would fit very nicely into Chapter 4.

Another weakness is its length (485 pages). A product development consultant could learn from the book, as I did, but will have to skim many pages to find the nuggets. The whole book will be of value to management consultants who want to understand modern product-innovation practices. Others might consider some alternatives. For those primarily interested in the stories, Nayak's other book, Breakthroughs! (Pfeiffer; 1994) is packed with them in a most readable style. Those looking for management tools should consider Revolutionizing Product Development by Wheelwright and Clark (Free Press; 1992) or its executive version, Leading Product Development (1995). Another option is Developing Products in Half the Time (myself and Reinertsen, Van Nostrand Reinhold; 1995).

Reviewed by Preston G. Smith CMC

(Reviewed in the Journal of Management Consulting -- now renamed to Consulting to Management, May 1996, pp. 69-70.)

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