Our Principles & Practices

Delivering new products to market faster

When developing a new product or service time is of the essence.  Shortening the time it takes to develop and launch a product or service into the market is critical to gain a competitive edge, reduce costs and maximize its lifecycle. 

Developing new products and services is hard and fraught with challenges. Time is often lost in product development by work simply not flowing and spending time waiting, resulting in huge delay costs through increased development cost, lost revenues or penalties for lateness.  We work with businesses in product development from developing jet engines to trains, new IT systems to new medicines to help remove these delays and reduce the cost of them. Here are some of the top challenges we’ve seen from our work in this area.

 

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Early Starts, Late Finishes

Starting work too early, generating work for other teams, choking the programme, preventing valuable work happening.

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Plan Before Value

People rigidly sticking to the plan even if it won't deliver success because they have "committed" it rather than looking to accelerate the delivery of value. 

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Assumption Avalanche

Work is running behind schedule and urgent decisions are made based on assumptions to minimise delays.  The cycle is repeated, carrying risk forward until one is shown to be wrong!

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Multi-Tasking / Context Switching

Multiple activities in progress simultaneously switching between work (can lead up to 30% productivity loss).

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Problem Percolation

Problems are known by teams but they are not addressed quickly enough, often because they aren't well described or routed to the right people.

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Rhythm & Blues

Teams planning at different rhythms and different times, leading to significant management overhead and an inability to commit to plans when teams used shared resources.

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Assumed Accountabilities

People aren't clear on their roles or assume the accountabilities of others (can lead to a lack of ownership).

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Meeting Mediocrity

Lots of meetings with the wrong people at the wrong time that consume lots of capacity but don't provide useful outcomes.

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Learned Helplessness

Teams are used to either problems not being fixed or leaders taking problems away from them and develop a habit of accepting problems or waiting for someone to fix them. 

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Resource Ransom

Programme and project managers holding more senior leaders to ransom, claiming that they cannot deliver programme goals without more resource.

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We deliver

A 30% reduction in the cost of delay in 100 days

Using our Release Valve® process we critically analyse impediments to flow, resource usage and ways of working to identify specific challenges that may be holding your product development back.  We will then tackle those head on, deploying solutions such as collaboration, Agile development methodologies, and automation tools and routines to deliver a 30% reduction in the cost of delay in 100 days.

Book a Flow Release Review

Our goal is to excite our clients through innovative products and services