Managing Product Development: Hands-On
Key Information
Prerequisites:
Familiarity with key marketing principles, including market analyses, segmentation and marketing mix. Understanding of business case development, such as is provided by Successful Business Cases:Hands-On. Some knowledge of project management tools and applications, e.g. Microsoft Project is useful but not essential.
Outline and Objectives:
- Demonstrate a practical approach to successfully managing new product and services development and introduction.
- Identify the key success factors and causes of failure
- Maximise the opportunities whilst minimizing the risks
This course covers the practical dos and don'ts of development projects and creates a framework and process for stakeholder engagement, documents, controls and communications to optimise the opportunity whilst minimizing the risk.
Who Should Attend:
Anyone involved in the process of bringing new products and services to market, such as key stakeholders, and those directly driving or leading developments eg product marketing, product management but for whom project management is not a key role activity. Suitable for anyone involved in the development process
This course is particularly beneficial to growing organisations that have ad hoc development processes seeking to create a formal methodology to ensure best use of company resources, diligent selection of best development opportunities and whole business alignment, without creating bureaucracy.
Course Contents:
- Why formalise the development process? Impact of uncontrolled development and benefits of a formal process, development in a portfolio context. Sources of innovation & capturing ideas.
- Types of development and key differences in approach: comparison of project methodologies, development services versus products, enhancements versus new, product retirement.
- Development project key documents, information and purposes: Product Requirements Document, Project Initiation Document, Service Definition Document, version control and the portfolio context.
- Competing for resources; importance of the business case, development funnel.
- Thinking about the customer: market testing, identifying touch points, the customer view, value proposition. Marketing mix, proof-of-concept.
- Managing the business case development to engage the whole business, internal stakeholder analysis (exercise), stakeholder engagement.
- Engaging the development project team: team roles, team dynamics (exercise), managing conflict
- Management and ownership: development steering board, budgets and plans
- Controls: change control, version control, budgets and tolerances. What if something goes wrong?
- Reporting and communication: comms plan (exercise)
- Risk and issues management
- Managing partners and suppliers in development projects.
- Pre-selling and launch planning
- Operational handover: stakeholder sign-offs, training plans, operational impacts, benefits tracking, KPIs,
- Sales - marketing alignment: go-to-market, sales enablement
