Flexible Product Development Consulting and Training Services

Flexible Product Development Consulting and Training Services

For the past twenty years our product development consulting and training have guided manufacturers toward cutting-edge development processes for delivering successful new products faster. Please see our time-to-market website for detailed information on the product development services that other clients have found valuable.

Specifically for flexible product development, we offer the same general options: assessment, implementation, and training.

Assessment
Using proprietary consulting techniques, we assess how flexible your product development is today and recommend where it could be improved to your benefit. We look at performance on selected past projects to discover where the disruption is and what it is costing you. We investigate queues and typical bottlenecks to understand how easily you could respond to change.

Our assessment results in opportunities for improvement that either you can implement yourself or with our assistance.

Implementation
Although the flexibility techniques work together to mutually support each other, it is often easier to implement each one using a pilot of its technique on a small project where results can be seen quickly. We follow a momentum-building implementation style developed by Robert Schaffer. We support improvement with metrics so that you can see the value gained.

Because enduring organizational improvement starts with individuals and teams and often requires significant readjustment of organizational values, we remain sensitive to these areas throughout.

Training
We offer full training in flexible product development techniques through a two-day workshop that includes a running case study to practice the techniques. You not only learn the techniques, but just as importantly, you assimilate the underlying style of flexibility, such as delaying decisions until the last responsible moment or methodically pruning your alternatives so that you always have a fallback position—and normally several such positions.

We regularly conduct public workshops. The next ones are in Atlanta, USA; Beaverton, Oregon, USA; Worcester, Massachusetts, USA; London; Göteborg, Sweden; Shanghai; Hong Kong; Kuala Lumpur; Bangalore; Mumbai; and Delhi.

We also conduct in-house versions of these workshops, which have advantages over the public ones:

They train a larger group of your people, which greatly raises the implementation success rate over individuals attending a public workshop
On a per-head basis, they are less expensive than public workshops
We customize the material so that you obtain the mix that suits your current needs best
We avoid the sharing of company confidential information that can occur in a public workshop

Please see the workshop brochure, the MMTI site, or contact us to learn more about any of these services.