Your team regularly uncovers exciting new product opportunities that fit your technology and that customers are hot to buy. Then when they don’t fly through development, it’s easy to think that not having enough people is the problem. Especially given the brain drain going on in industry.
But the real brain drain affecting new product growth is pipeline resource management. The pervasive habit of allowing too much work into development. A guaranteed way to sabotage the effectiveness of your team and the speed and predictability of your new product growth.
The good news is that it’s a self-inflicted wound. And luckily one that you can rapidly recover from!
Diagnosing the Problem
Want to know if you have too much WIP in manufacturing? Simple. Go to Gemba and see whether parts are stacked to the ceiling waiting to go through the bottleneck. But you can’t do that with new product development because it’s knowledge work. Most of the WIP is hidden – buried on individual PCs. But the effect is still dramatic and chaotic. So you need to look for the symptoms. If you are seeing projects taking longer than expected and fire drills to meet deadlines becoming routine, you have too many projects underway for your bandwidth.
The Impact
Take an example where your team has the people to run four projects at full speed, but you allow six to run. It’s simple math— 6/4=1.5. Everything will take 50% longer. A one-year project will take you 18 months.
But it’s worse than that. You don’t just spread the people doing the work evenly across more projects. The even bigger brain drain is the chaos of jumping back and forth between unfinished tasks to keep all the plates spinning. And even when they aren’t working on a project, it is still sapping part of their cognitive bandwidth.
If you have any doubts about the negative impact of multitasking, try it here with this test.
Bottom line. It ends up taking closer to twice as long as it needs to—so 2 years. Think about the impact of that.
- Fewer launches per period from the same number of people
- Longer time to market
But there are some less obvious hidden costs too.
- Lost cash flow – 1 year of cash flow from the 4 projects that you could have finished earlier – lost forever
- Poor visibility – People are so busy they don’t have time to report status and make updates
- Losing Projects – What happens when you ask someone who’s already too busy to evaluate a new opportunity? Do they have time to do that well? Or do you end up letting bad projects slip in unnoticed?
- Burnt-out staff – Does anybody actually enjoy working this way? And who can afford to lose good people these days?
The Solution – Pipeline Resource Management
So what can you do to stop the brain drain in your new product pipeline?
The key is making the problem visible and then managing your WIP, rigorously. And the simplest way to see the power of limiting WIP is to download our free AcceleTrak™ NPD Bandwidth Accelerator download. This simple tool will help you mathematically calculate your team’s true capacity and see what an ideal portfolio would look like.
The core concept of this solution is a virtual drum. Figure out the maximum number of large projects you can handle without any undue stress or chaos. Set that as your WIP limit for the drum—the number of projects in execution. Then the rule is that one has to exit “the drum” for another to enter. But don’t confuse simple with ineffective. Our customers using this approach have cut time to revenue by up to 60%.
While a spreadsheet is an easy way to see how the WIP control helps, our AcceleTrak Innovation OS gives you the kind of WIP control needed at enterprise scale—along with the real time pipeline visibility you need to maintain this disciplined approach. And it does this all with automated workflows that capture the work your people already do so they can focus on delivering predictable growth.
If you’d like to learn more about how that’s possible you can book a short chat here.
To your growth,
