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The product development newsletter no 4 |
| Topic: What makes for success, part 3 |
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| The key factors that make firms’
product developments successful (continued) |
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| How human factors screw the best
intentions |
| As engineers we tend to think that once we have mapped out our ideal
process, everyone is going to do exactly as we have devised it - like a
well-oiled machine with everything foreseen and no problems. Unfortunately
they don’t. The best-documented process in the world can, in practice, be
operated just as badly as the worst - sometimes even worse. |
| One company I saw recently had a moderately good process (did at least
half the right things in and mostly in the right order) that was run in an
unbelievable manner - no team working, an institutional “not my job”
attitude, and a culture of “lets define whose fault it’s going to be when
the product is late” - because it always was. Everyone retreated into their
own boltholes and kept their heads inside; even the designers kept to their
own workstations and didn’t like to communicate with each other. |
| How had this internal culture developed? Answer: incrementally and
un-noticed over decades; everyone now accepted it to be the norm. Everyone
bitched about the problems that ‘the process’ generated. Dissatisfaction was
rife and everyone enjoyed bitching because it made them feel less
responsible (it’s always ‘them’ not us). But what they hadn’t recognised was
that it wasn’t just the process (which was reasonably workable) but the way
everyone operated it. And the MD contributed to this because he was not only
on an ego-trip but one of the most accomplished practitioners of mental
torture; no one would stand up to him. He was brought in by a rather weak
chairman to get a grip: so he gripped. |
| Departmental seniorities and day-to-day pressures (exacerbated by the
not-that-good process) got in the way of breaking out of this cycle and
there wasn’t a leading light who identified the problem and would suggest
redirecting the ethos. The process owner was the QA area who continually
fiddled around the edges by making minor mods to make it easier to audit.
That progressively removed teeth from the process; not only that but they
didn’t bother to tell the design area, who were unaware that they were now
supposed to working to issue 7 when issue 4 was only 6 months previous! And
the MD wasn’t really expert in this field and couldn’t put their finger on
the best way to improve it - knew it had problems but couldn’t identify
exactly why; inter-departmental fog made it even more difficult. |
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| So what to do? |
| Culture is developed and nurtured from the top. So how should this firm
change? By the top taking an interest and making the time to see how the
process operates at all levels; getting everyone around a table to make
everyone talk to each other; making it clear how the process was supposed to
be run. (Truth be known, they didn’t really know.) You have to get into
facilitation mode and look at the outline detail (if that’s not a
contradiction). Understand exactly what happens; how the process is being
run and tutor rather than kick the players to act as they should. No mental
torture or blame culture. Sounds simple if you say it quickly; but it really
isn’t easy to do. |
| The problem as always lies in the detail; and in the discipline to
monitor the detail and make sure it happens as designed. At the same time,
realise that every project is different and has different needs. So you
don’t force them all down the same path; if you do that, it leads to delay
through unnecessary bureaucracy. (We’ll discuss that in a later newsletter
to illustrate how that can be done.) |
| The moral is that it’s not good enough just to have a brilliant process.
You also have to have a workable culture, attention to detail, and make
everyone realise that they have to enjoy the discipline that is needed to
run it. It’s rather like the Japanese train drivers who are taught to salute
each signal as they pass it. Sounds facile but their trains do run to time.
Our product development programmes are difficult enough to run well without
human factors adding more problems. So why don’t we all realise that and
make life so much easier? Answers by e-mail please. |
