Best Practices - New Product Introduction
About New Product Introduction
New product Introduction (NPI) is a corporate process that introduces a new product to the market from the idea stage to mass production sign-off of the final product.
Though, in some cases it may be based on a specific customer request, in most of the cases it is originated at the corporate itself, analyzing market demand, technological changes and competitive edge.
The process complexity and length depends on the resulted product and can last between several weeks to several months.
To sustain corporate competitiveness, the organization strive to shorten that cycle and thus it typically involves several teams or departments (even outside the organization) that collaborates and work together to produce the product deliverables in parallel.
Naturally, the different teams are dependent on each other activities and the project management team requires aligning and synchronizing all activities to create a cohesive effective and rapid work towards achieving a qualified product in a timely fashion.
Using Clarizen and specifically Clarizen collaboration features of: roadmap, delegation of management, tightly and loosely connected projects allows you to build collaboratively plan for each team that is linked, viewed with and synchronized with other related plans.
The New Product Introduction template includes typical milestones and tasks from preliminary analysis phase to final commercialization and mass production readiness closure phases. The schedule of the project, build by the dependencies and durations set within represent an industry standard, however can be changed to fit your exact business environment.
About Clarizen NPI Template
- The NPI template includes the main project for the entire process and sub-projects for every different team\type of activities that needs to be carried out as follows:
- Product Marketing & Sales – gathers all the marketing and sales activities require to define, qualify and market the product
- Engineering – gathers all the engineering activities require to design, develop and verify the product
- Logistic & Production – gathers all the logistic & operational activities require to produce the product
The main project includes either milestones that should be executed by the entire team together (such as ‘initial product feasibility’) or shortcuts to the related milestones in the appropriate team’s project (e.g.: - ‘Marketing requirements’ milestone that appears in the main project is a shortcut to the appropriate milestone that actually reside within the ‘Product Marketing & Sales’ project.)
The different activities are grouped under an appropriate milestone, so that there will always be an up-to-date progress reflected on the roadmap.
Dependencies and shortcuts are used to sequence and show appropriate order of activities\milestones, even from different plans.
It is recommend using gates within such a project. Some of the milestones existing in this template should be used as such (e.g.: Go\No-GO). To do that, please read the appropriate section below.
Using Clarizen NPI Template
Set Gates in Project
Should you desire to set some of the milestones as gates, please use Clarizen life cycle machine for that, by doing the following:
- Make sure all milestones and activities that should follow the decision point within the gate are sequenced and follows that gate (already default within existing template)
- To confirm gate opening, mark the appropriate milestone as “completed”
- Otherwise, you may either keep it as “draft”, “on hold” or “cancelled” appropriately (based on the decision taken at this point)
- Following milestones should be set to “on-hold” state until the appropriate gate is approved. Once gate is approved (marked as completed), you may activate the corresponding following milestones.
Define Project Management Team
Decide who should be the managers that should work with you to execute the project and set them up appropriately within your project.
For example:
- Team leaders – marketing, sales, engineering, logistics. They should be set each as managers of the appropriate project and should be resources of the ‘Initial Product Feasibility’ milestone in the main project
- Executive reviewers – Ones who should observe and review project progress. Should be set as reviewers at the main project (should you desire to have external reviewers watching a specific work items within the project, assign them as reviewers only into that specific work items)
Define Every Team Resources
Every team leader (including the project manager) should define the pool of resources for his project, from which users can be assigned to the actual activities.
Update Scope & Upload content
Every team leader (including the project manager) should update the scope of work and appropriately the work items to fit the specific project needs, by updating the work plan appropriately.
Content of documents, notes or discussions can be created and uploaded accordingly.
Update Schedule & Dependencies
Every team leader (including the project manager) should update the schedule and dependencies of appropriate activities to fit the specific project needs, by updating the work plan scheduling attributes or dependencies appropriately.
Other modifications
Link to pilot customer
Project manager or marketing leader can link the appropriate pilot customer (if used) to the project, by linking the appropriate customer entity to the main project or the marketing sub-project.
Log project issues in-context
Should your project have any issues or risks, log that within the Issue Management system and link it to the impacted work items in your project.
Update cost information
Users who carry appropriate roles in the project and having appropriate financial permissions can update financial data such as material costs or other expenses.