Product Development Process.

Long development times, lack of visibility around progress and restricted budgets hampers many new releases, often leading to a divergence from customer expectations.

lean programme

Product Development Process.

Long development times, lack of visibility around progress and restricted budgets hampers many new releases, often leading to a divergence from customer expectations.

Why Product Development Process?

Time to Market & Customer Experience are the two imperatives of modern product development. A quality product, excellent service and on-time delivery are a given rather than differentiators.

Development, too, is moving towards a much more collaborative process. Long development plans with milestones and major launch dates that effectively bet the farm are being replaced by highly structured processes that deliver features or small milestones every week or fortnight – these are known as sprints.

Take Control of Your Future

The emphasis has moved to the performance of small teams collaborating and self-managing their work. Lean Product Development & Agile Methods are a special implementation of a lean transformation that leverages the whole organisation to bring value to the customer. The principles of a lean product development process include:

  1. Clearly define customer value.
  2. Explore all alternative solutions early on.
  3. Create a development process that loads all steps of the process evenly.
  4. Use standardisation to reduce variation and increase predictability.
  5. Appoint a ‘chief engineer’ with end-to-end ownership
  6. Ensure that inter-departmental integration and functional expertise are balanced.
  7. Relentlessly pursue technical competence.
  8. Integrate suppliers into the development system.
  9. Build problem-solving and relentless improvement into the process.
  10. Ensure technologies adapt to your people and process
  11. Align the organisation with simple visual communication.
  12. Emphasise standardisation and organisational learning.

Contact us today to talk about your business can be more efficient, effective, and collaborative.


These 12 principles are a refinement of our five core dimensions of a lean transformation that emphasise the longer-term development of people and processes to deliver real customer value and great customer experience.

Every Product and Service Development programme we deliver is bespoke depending on the needs of each organisation. These programmes usually consist of several smaller phases of work that each look at a different aspect of the organisation, working in synergy to deliver powerful, sustainable results.
These phases of work can include some or all of the following modules:
  • Process Mapping
    Process Mapping visually shows the steps of an activity and the people who are involved in carrying out each step. The mapping of the process enables groups of workers involved in certain functions to visualise their work and discuss all steps required to complete certain tasks. The result of process mapping is a reduction in the time and resources required to complete tasks.
  • Sales & Operations Planning
    Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is primarily a business management process. The aim of S&OP is to ensure all business functions are aligned to balance supply and demand, delivering a continuous competitive advantage to the organisation. It requires cross-organisational collaboration to create detailed forecasts for predicted sales and the certainty that the necessary resources are in place.
  • Operational Excellence Benchmarking
    Understanding the current state is necessary before embarking on any change programme. Our Benchmark Model is a best-in-class model for companies to measure themselves in areas of Organisational Excellence, providing an agreed level from which a change programme is designed.
  • Value Stream Mapping
    Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is used by organisations to define, analyse and optimize the information/materials flow essential to the whole production process. VSM includes both value-adding steps and non-value-adding steps from the customer’s standpoint. The main purpose of Value Stream Mapping is to help managers and team leaders build and perfect the flow of work and to minimise the use of resources required to deliver the work.
  • Agile / Lean
    In software development, Agile practices approach the discovery of requirements and the development of solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organising and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to change. Agile and lean are complementary methodologies with Agile being most appropriate in Digital Transformation and software development.
  • Customer Journey Mapping
    Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual story of your customers’ interactions with your brand. This exercise helps businesses step into their customers’ shoes and see their business from an outside perspective. It allows companies to gain an insight into common customer pain points and to look at solutions which will meet the customer’s expectations.
  • Employee Engagement
    We look at the power of the people in your organisation and the potential that exists within them, and provide the hands-on training they need to effect change. We get to grips with your culture – to make sure it is one of excellence, quality and constant improvement. Most importantly, we know that no two companies are the same, so we work with you to develop a bespoke plan of action that works in tandem with your own business strategy.
  • Leadership
    Leadership is the ability to visualise, lead, encourage and coach a group of individuals to achieve a certain goal. The success of any transformation project is dependent on the leader’s ability to align the hearts and minds to a common understanding of, not just a need for change, but that change is the only option. 90% of change management failures are due to poor leadership.
  • Strategy Implementation
    A strategy is a framework for making decisions about the future direction of an organisation. Choosing the appropriate strategy takes account of the internal and external influences on an organisation and leverages the organisation’s unique process and capabilities to deliver a competitive advantage. To be successful, strategy implementation requires planning and execution skills with clear communication.
  • Organisational Behaviour
    Each has about themselves is of paramount importance to successfully delivering any change programme. It is the people who deliver change. Leaders of change should understand their people and be empathetic to them in order to bring them on the change journey.
  • White Belt
    Participants who undertake the Lean Awareness course are provided with an overview of fundamental Lean thinking and the context for further engagement with Lean. White Belt training introduces the concept of Continuous Improvement which lies at the core of Lean Transformation, and provides an introduction to 6-S and Workplace Organisation, the basis for all process improvement.
  • Yellow Belt
    Problem-solving is one of the key factors to successful Lean implementation; sustaining a Lean transformation requires continuous problem-solving by everyone in the organisation. In the context of Continuous Improvement, it is a never-ending process. Yellow Belt Training includes a suite of problem-solving tools which can be employed to increase profitability, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.
  • Green Belt
    To remain competitive, companies need to be relentless in their efforts to eliminate waste from their businesses. Better internal Lean and problem-solving capability supports the waste removal effort and nurtures a culture of Continuous Improvement. The Lean Green Belt training course provides highly experienced training coupled with project mentoring to optimise the knowledge transfer from teacher to student. The course contains relevant case studies, examples and exercises which are tailored to participants’ areas of focus. The course training and project mentoring can be delivered online or on site.

INSIGHTS

Operational Excellence

21st Century Product, Project & Service Development

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IMPACT

Business Process Improvement

How we helped this leading insurer meet their Quarterly Account Valuation Requirements through Business Process Improvement

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METHODOLOGY

The Way We See Things

A business is made up of a collection of inter-dependent units. Acknowledging and addressing each unit is the key to implementing impactful, long lasting results.

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Strive for Better.

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