Recently, Dr. Mark Hurwitz, Senior Director of Process, Platforms and Technology for Pall Corporation, gave a Webinar presentation about his company’s best practices for implementing and continuously improving its process for technology development and product commercialization.

A number of questions submitted during the live Q&A were left unaddressed.  Dr. Hurwitz’s responses to some of the most frequently-asked questions are listed below.

A: An effective NPD process can certainly be implemented without software. However, I doubt such a process would be efficient. Accolade provides a framework for monitoring the progress of projects, managing their relative value across a portfolio, and insuring gate decisions are made with sufficient information and properly recorded. Without such software, this framework would require a department of people dedicated to monitoring projects and flagging problems. In the days before widespread use of business software and personal computers, project planning departments performed a function similar to Accolade software but at greater expense to the company.

Q: How do you respond to advocates of “lean” NPD that criticize Stage-Gate® methodologies for being too batch oriented and that don't match the normal cadence of a typical new product development process?

A: I haven’t heard this before, but I find it somewhat out of touch with reality. Product development is batch oriented in the sense that it starts with an idea from some source and ends with a specific product being delivered to a specific customer. A continuous product development process seems to me an invitation to poor planning and lack of control of investment.

I have often heard the criticism that product specifications change during development due to changing circumstances in the market place, and stages might result in a product being blindly completed despite such changes. However, in reality, it is the responsibility of the project team and the Sponsors (Gate Keepers) to be aware of the outside world and raise flags if it appears the product specifications are no longer valid. Small changes can be accommodated within a project through critical reviews and adjustment of project schedules. Very large changes might require rethinking of the value of pursuing the product’s development at all. 

A: Yes. Project managers are required to bring large changes in projected cost or large schedule delays to the attention of the Sponsors in a critical review of the project in question. All projects must proceed through all gates and the Sponsors must gather for a meeting or teleconference to make each gate decision.

A: Mainly through the diligence of the R&D Portfolio Managers, whose principle responsibility is the health of their portfolio of proposed products. Marketing’s participation at gate meetings is not a particular problem, although getting good marketing information for the project can be as much of a challenge as the technical development itself.

A few simple rules help. The main rule is if a Sponsor delegates to a subordinate, authority to make the gate decisions must be delegated with the responsibility of attending the gate meeting. Another helpful procedure is each business line to set aside one morning each month for gate meetings. A lot of time and effort is saved by scheduling all gate meetings for the designated morning rather than trying to find an agreeable date for each gate meeting ad hoc. We rarely find more than four or five projects need a gate meeting the same morning. 

A: Derivative products with sufficient difference from the parent product to require R&D development are managed in Accolade. Some business lines and some manufacturing sites use Accolade for more conventional derivatives, others do not.

A: I would definitely implement Stage-Gate® and Accolade at the same time. My experience is that the tools need to be in place when the process starts. There is no advantage to starting a Stage-Gate® system without the tools to run it properly.