Effective Project Leadership Achieves a 40% Decrease in Product Development Timeline

A global telecommunications leader entered into a joint venture to provide improved inventory tracking capability to industrial mobile devices. The company marshaled its resources as quickly as possible by employing its robust stage-gate product development process to ensure early entry into this growing market.

The stage-gate process provided a good roadmap for defining cross-functional product development efforts and established decision points to ensure the project would meet its technical, financial, and quality requirements. However, history indicated that company resources had not been successful at delivering a new product to market quickly. The process, though well thought out, by itself was not enough to ensure rapid innovation. Efforts weren’t well orchestrated, causing inefficiencies and design rework and hindering decision making.

Realizing it was at risk of being late to market, the company brought in Integrated Project Management Company, Inc. (IPM) to lead the project. Company leadership recognized that IPM’s disciplined application of project management, business acumen, third-party objectivity, and leadership skills were necessary to efficiently and rapidly manage the cross-functional team through the various activities in the stage-gate process.

Harnessing the Talent

IPM first quickly assessed the project requirements and resource needs and, through the company’s senior management team and project sponsors, established a multi-disciplined (hardware and software development), multi-company, global development team. With such a large team working on interrelated aspects of the product simultaneously, it was critical to define roles and responsibilities, standardize the team communications processes, and develop an integrated project plan.

With the critical path identified, IPM identified risks to a successful and timely product launch and put mitigation plans in place. Progress was diligently tracked, and actions were taken to resolve issues and mitigate potential new risks to keep the project on track. In addition, IPM conducted monthly senior management project review meetings and facilitated stage-gate reviews to maintain alignment and ensure rapid decision making.

Reaping the Results

Through IPM’s application of disciplined project management and leadership, product development progressed 40 percent faster than similar projects using the same organizational resources. IPM’s project management approach and tools ensured that each project team member thoroughly understood their specific responsibilities and how others depended on their work, and that they bought into the overall project objectives and milestones. Ultimately, IPM established the standard that the company adopted for its internal project managers.

Industry: Consumer Products
Service: Product Development