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The product development newsletter no 9 |
| Interludes and diversions - no 1 |
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| To add some interesting comment to what has gone before, I thought you
might like to have some diversions that you might identify with: |
| The first one comes from a late-2003 report, from the German Fraunhofer
Institute for Industrial Engineering. They investigated product development
in the Europe-wide motor industry and researched more than 100 car
assemblers and suppliers in various tiers. And I had always thought the car
industry to be one of the better examples. But maybe it’s a case of unknown
grass appearing to be greener on the other side? Their criticism was quite
scathing. They reported: |
| 1. Poor project management, projects often started too late and
not adequately followed through; partners (tier 1 and 2 component suppliers)
left in the dark; lack of decisions in time or at all; operational frenzy. |
| 2. Mismanagement of human factors - investment in them comes
last. |
| 3. Experienced employees being replaced by younger inexperienced
careerists; lack of trust and terrible communications (too much politics,
not enough honest professionalism). |
| 4. The reducing number of respected development chiefs who
combine human competence with an infallible instinct for the right product -
the inexperienced younger careerists are pushing engineers like this into
early retirement. (Maybe that’s part of their careerism!) |
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It’s a cultural thing, as we discussed in these newsletters. I wonder
how many of you recognise related traits where you sit. Has the car industry
always operated like this? Judging from the articles you see, you might
think they are the exemplar to follow. And they certainly seek their pints
of blood from suppliers. |
| So what do they not do? Their organisations are large: very large. To
design a new car engine, for example, they might use teams of up to 300,
divided into perhaps more than 20 sub-system areas. The design of most of
the sub-systems require input from others; and likewise the output from each
is used by certain other sub-systems. So if most of the tasks are started at
the same time, inevitably most of them have to work with assumed data rather
than the factual output they need from other areas. Add in a group of
dependent suppliers and it gets even better. They are kept waiting for
input, get going on partial (and partly wrong) data, and then have to make
last minute changes, usually fairly desperate and involving costly tooling
which the car maker argues about meeting the full costs of. |
| This is where the wise, much experienced older chief comes in. Right
from the start, they have a better instinct to make more nearly correct
assumptions. Partly from product knowledge and partly from understanding
where problems will arise. They know what to ask of which other areas that
have the key to their potential problem; this makes all the difference. The
less experienced lack the history to know this. As a result, the greybeards’
projects need far less rework later. Get rid of the greybeards, and late
chaos results from mountains of rework to correct poor early assumptions.
And naturally it’s no one’s fault because it’s hard to work out why it went
wrong. Politics here often muddies the water to prevent accurate diagnosis.
Maybe you have a related situation where your problems, perhaps not quite so
complex, nonetheless suffer some of this? |
| But you also need to pause for preplanning thought before you even
start, to work out in which order you should do the tasks so you don’t start
one before the correct input from another is available. The experienced
older chief knows this. In other words, don’t confuse activity with action.
You may delay starting a task but with a bit of pre-thought you can complete
it faster and sooner than if you had started earlier. And it takes far fewer
man-hours. |
| Which brings us to comment on point 2 above: mismanaged peoples policy.
Why de we lose experienced engineers? Is it because we are sometimes guilty
of thinking rather more robotically than humanly. Or is it just common sense
over-ruled by top level “one size fits all” policy? And if we staff our
peoples (HR) area with administrators to operate this policy, who don’t have
much knowledge of what people actually do, we have an interesting recipe for
... who knows what! It’s a thorny subject that has untold knock-on effects. |
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Typically, if we can’t keep more experienced engineers because of, for
example, rigid salary policy, that starts some unfathomable problems.
Relatively new ones (around 30 years old) who could save so much project
time by their few years of experience, frequently leave for a leg up in
another firm. This can occur, for example, where salary inflation gives
inexperienced newcomers almost as much as useful 4-year experienced staff.
Naturally they’re really fed up when they discover this and quickly find a
leg up elsewhere at the money they should have had. And what could have been
a small extra salary cost turns out to be peanuts compared to the cost of
the project screw-up. Or they apply for a better paid position elsewhere in
the firm where they can’t contribute their real skill. To avoid this needs a
salary policy based on service as well as rank, which few western companies
have the courage to run. |
| It’s interesting that in Toyota (I don’t know of other examples), chief
engineers are home grown by a salary policy that values and nurtures
experience. They don’t get to where they are until they’ve had 20 years or
more experience working their way through most of the departments they’re
going to run. In other words, they are the people referred to in points 3
and 4 above that the young buck careerists are pushing out. |
| In our 3 linked workshops on how you plan, organise and run the
development of a product, the first conclusion delegates work out for
themselves is that these cultural and HR factors are critical. No matter how
well planned and written up the detailed process is, it never seems to run
as you planned it (with much waste of time and money, and products that
don’t meet their sales targets). This conclusion usually comes as a surprise
because most of us believe that the most important factor is having a
perfect process, whereupon the ship will run like a well oiled machine. And
if it doesn’t then it’s just a glitch that won’t happen next time. It isn’t
and it doesn’t come right next time. The delegates come to realise (learn)
that it’s a fundamental factor and, more important, what it needs to fix it. |
| Having provided some food for thought, you have a month to think whether
it might just apply to where you are. And, of course, to formulate your
solution! |
