Unit 42 Agile Paper
1.42 Agile
Agile is iterative approach with tasks broken into small increments, planning far in advance, and when using agile methodology scope is a continual reassessment of requirement priorities by the business.
Agile project management framework
In the agile project management framework, the activities involved in each phase can be classified as Envision (helps to create a high-level vision for the project). Speculate (helps to create a high-level roadmap for the project based on the available information). Explore (where the team will start developing and delivering the features). Adapt (the team will continuously adapt and change their plan based on the feedback they receive about the completed features). And the last phase is Close …show more content…
(after the team has generated sufficient value the project will close and the features delivered will be finalised). Agile project management framework has a series of steps that start with an initial vision of the product to the final product (Ogunsina, 2013).
Envision phase defines the beginning of the project like a kick-off meeting, for shorter projects envision and explore phase can be combined (Chandana, 2012). This involves development and product team members in the process with a series of collaborative meetings. Vision is expressed in the product vision during the Envision phase, and it has two characteristics, first is clarity, where everyone must be clear what is being tried to be built and everyone should have the same understanding. Second is elevator statement or goal, the goal is a brief statement designed to impart the intent to the project within two minutes.
In the speculate phase, it translates product vision into backlog requirements, which are user stories. It finds the overall approach to meet the requirements including the architecture or design characteristic (Ogunsina, 2013). The first primary activity is the vision of the product is translated into specific desired features, and the second primary activity is each feature is broken down to stories.
In the explore phase, teams start delivering the work, testing and accepted features in form of stories (Ogunsina, 2013). Product vision which is being translated into release plans and iteration plans are executed to give project deliverables.
In adapt phase, project team constantly, evaluate and make appropriate adaptive actions. There are four areas focused on product functionality (Primarily from the customer team’s perspective), product quality (Primarily from the technical team’s perspective), team performance, and project status (Chandana, 2012).
In close phase, the project is closed in an orderly manner, key learning the lessons are captured and celebration of project closures (Ogunsina, 2013).
1.5 Company Effort
Marketing managers must ensure an effective transition from a new product to regular operations, and this requires marketing managers to carefully developed a complete marketing plan, the careful analysis that goes into a marketing plan also assure that new products deliver superior customer value. Products need to be based on effective design, providing superior customer value emerges from a well-designed and well implement new product development process (G A. , 2009).
Managing new product development requires company effort was clear authority and coordination of complicated activities, top level support is vital and the commitment must be explicit (G A. , 2009). The highest level of the company can make new product development part of the core business of the company, the allocation has adequate resources can help communicate that commitment. Firms that foster a culture of innovation also develop more effective new product development process. Someone must be in charge of new product development and the person must have a clear line of authority to get things done across different apartments. Cross-functional teams are an important element in new product success. Firms must coordinate research and development with production, finance, and marketing to ensure products meet customer needs and come to the market timely manner, and the organisation need to get products to market before customer needs change ahead of competitor’s offerings.
The entire process needs to be conducted in the efficient manner that recognises trade-offs between costs and customer benefits.
1.6 Typical issues in New Product Introduction management
1.61 Needs for Product Manager
When an organisation develops many product categories, the top management may decide to put someone in charge of each category or brand to make sure that appropriate attention is paid to these products.
Product managers are especially common in large companies’ that produce many kinds of products. Several product managers may serve under a marketing manager and product managers are sometimes responsible for other product entire marketing effort. In order to avoid the problems that sometimes occur when the product manager has to coordinate several marketing activities, some companies use their product managers as product champions who are mainly concerned was implementing promotional effects (G A. , 2009). The activities of product managers vary greatly depending on their experience and aggressiveness and the company’s organisational philosophy, product managers may work with managers on other countries side whether and how to adapt the product for different markets (G A. , 2009).
1.62 Some other issues in New Product Introduction management
Require skilled people
One of the challenges in new product introduction management is to bring skilled people on board who can contribute effectively towards the new product development process (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007).
Launching a new product needs thorough market research, surveys, and meeting customers to understand their needs. Data collection, surveys, analysis market trends are essential in new product development and the organisation has to identify the right people who have the passion for completing these tasks accurately and efficiently.
Financing
Production development process is expensive and risky (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007). A new product development firm has to ensure it will receive compensation in line with the risk it is assuming. Common models range from a low risk where an investor pays the company for the development fee to where the company arranges financing with its own resources or with outside investors and receives a share of the …show more content…
profits.
Design Team
Once the organisation has identified a particular product to develop, a specialist team is essential. The team made up of people that can handle the design, create the technical drawing, set up manufacturing and determine the target markets for a specific product (Minato, 2014).
In order to make sure a successful product development, the product development team has to design a product that has unique functionality and attractive to the target market, thus requires talent designer to generate good ideas. And also, it is important to manufacture the product at a reasonable cost, and it has to meet safety standards. All these aspects have to be in the designers mind while creating a product that will commercialise.
Deliver quality products on time
It is crucial for the organisation to have the appropriate machines and infrastructure which support the manufacturing of the new product. The organisation has to set up the production line and pre-production validation of the design. If the firm does not have the right kind of machinery, delivering the new product within the planned time can be a major challenge (Sameer Kumar and James Wellbrock, 2003). The organisation must have experts who can design product specifications and operate high-end machines, customer documentation and instruction manuals may also need to be developed.
Quality control
Recently marketers and service business have been paying a lot of attention to improving service quality through Total Quality Management, even produces basic commodities have customer service concerns that are part of the overall marketing plans (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007).
Service improvement is harder to implement than improvement in physical products, and one reason is that server is inseparable from the service. The best ways to improve service is to train people and then empower them to the server. Empowerment is giving employees the authority to correct a problem without checking with management, line level employees are much closer to problems, by giving them the power to correct problems is a way to improve customer satisfaction.
There are several aspects that the product manager can do to make the implementation of quality improvement efforts more successful. Managers must lead the quality effort their actions and involvement, TQM won’t work without top-level support (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007). Firms that are successful clearly specified jobs and measure performance, the organisation must detail what tasks need to be done, how and by whom. Getting a return on quality is important. Therefore, the managers must take care to deal with the most critical customer satisfaction issues in order to control
costs.
1.7 Conclusion
New product introduction process includes a transformation of a good idea into a commercial product or service through a series of stage gate process. These stages or phases of work are designed to minimise risk while optimising the innovation projects to deliver the most value to the organisation, because of the structure of the new product development process, a project can be halted at any of the gates or decision points throughout the duration of the project. Each stage of work is value-added for completeness and is planned for the next stage of work is validated against a predetermined set of criteria in order for a project to pass the gate.
Strategically a firm must address all projects to fit with customer needs and industry trends. Product categories help to framed development work by matching industry growth trends with target customer needs. Senior management is responsible for determining the innovation strategy in terms of markets and technologies as well as product categories.
Agile is iterative approach with tasks broken into small increments, planning far in advance, and when using agile methodology scope is a continual reassessment of requirement priorities by the business.
Agile project management framework
In the agile project management framework, the activities involved in each phase can be classified as Envision (helps to create a high-level vision for the project). Speculate (helps to create a high-level roadmap for the project based on the available information). Explore (where the team will start developing and delivering the features). Adapt (the team will continuously adapt and change their plan based on the feedback they receive about the completed features). And the last phase is Close …show more content…
(after the team has generated sufficient value the project will close and the features delivered will be finalised). Agile project management framework has a series of steps that start with an initial vision of the product to the final product (Ogunsina, 2013).
Envision phase defines the beginning of the project like a kick-off meeting, for shorter projects envision and explore phase can be combined (Chandana, 2012). This involves development and product team members in the process with a series of collaborative meetings. Vision is expressed in the product vision during the Envision phase, and it has two characteristics, first is clarity, where everyone must be clear what is being tried to be built and everyone should have the same understanding. Second is elevator statement or goal, the goal is a brief statement designed to impart the intent to the project within two minutes.
In the speculate phase, it translates product vision into backlog requirements, which are user stories. It finds the overall approach to meet the requirements including the architecture or design characteristic (Ogunsina, 2013). The first primary activity is the vision of the product is translated into specific desired features, and the second primary activity is each feature is broken down to stories.
In the explore phase, teams start delivering the work, testing and accepted features in form of stories (Ogunsina, 2013). Product vision which is being translated into release plans and iteration plans are executed to give project deliverables.
In adapt phase, project team constantly, evaluate and make appropriate adaptive actions. There are four areas focused on product functionality (Primarily from the customer team’s perspective), product quality (Primarily from the technical team’s perspective), team performance, and project status (Chandana, 2012).
In close phase, the project is closed in an orderly manner, key learning the lessons are captured and celebration of project closures (Ogunsina, 2013).
1.5 Company Effort
Marketing managers must ensure an effective transition from a new product to regular operations, and this requires marketing managers to carefully developed a complete marketing plan, the careful analysis that goes into a marketing plan also assure that new products deliver superior customer value. Products need to be based on effective design, providing superior customer value emerges from a well-designed and well implement new product development process (G A. , 2009).
Managing new product development requires company effort was clear authority and coordination of complicated activities, top level support is vital and the commitment must be explicit (G A. , 2009). The highest level of the company can make new product development part of the core business of the company, the allocation has adequate resources can help communicate that commitment. Firms that foster a culture of innovation also develop more effective new product development process. Someone must be in charge of new product development and the person must have a clear line of authority to get things done across different apartments. Cross-functional teams are an important element in new product success. Firms must coordinate research and development with production, finance, and marketing to ensure products meet customer needs and come to the market timely manner, and the organisation need to get products to market before customer needs change ahead of competitor’s offerings.
The entire process needs to be conducted in the efficient manner that recognises trade-offs between costs and customer benefits.
1.6 Typical issues in New Product Introduction management
1.61 Needs for Product Manager
When an organisation develops many product categories, the top management may decide to put someone in charge of each category or brand to make sure that appropriate attention is paid to these products.
Product managers are especially common in large companies’ that produce many kinds of products. Several product managers may serve under a marketing manager and product managers are sometimes responsible for other product entire marketing effort. In order to avoid the problems that sometimes occur when the product manager has to coordinate several marketing activities, some companies use their product managers as product champions who are mainly concerned was implementing promotional effects (G A. , 2009). The activities of product managers vary greatly depending on their experience and aggressiveness and the company’s organisational philosophy, product managers may work with managers on other countries side whether and how to adapt the product for different markets (G A. , 2009).
1.62 Some other issues in New Product Introduction management
Require skilled people
One of the challenges in new product introduction management is to bring skilled people on board who can contribute effectively towards the new product development process (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007).
Launching a new product needs thorough market research, surveys, and meeting customers to understand their needs. Data collection, surveys, analysis market trends are essential in new product development and the organisation has to identify the right people who have the passion for completing these tasks accurately and efficiently.
Financing
Production development process is expensive and risky (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007). A new product development firm has to ensure it will receive compensation in line with the risk it is assuming. Common models range from a low risk where an investor pays the company for the development fee to where the company arranges financing with its own resources or with outside investors and receives a share of the …show more content…
profits.
Design Team
Once the organisation has identified a particular product to develop, a specialist team is essential. The team made up of people that can handle the design, create the technical drawing, set up manufacturing and determine the target markets for a specific product (Minato, 2014).
In order to make sure a successful product development, the product development team has to design a product that has unique functionality and attractive to the target market, thus requires talent designer to generate good ideas. And also, it is important to manufacture the product at a reasonable cost, and it has to meet safety standards. All these aspects have to be in the designers mind while creating a product that will commercialise.
Deliver quality products on time
It is crucial for the organisation to have the appropriate machines and infrastructure which support the manufacturing of the new product. The organisation has to set up the production line and pre-production validation of the design. If the firm does not have the right kind of machinery, delivering the new product within the planned time can be a major challenge (Sameer Kumar and James Wellbrock, 2003). The organisation must have experts who can design product specifications and operate high-end machines, customer documentation and instruction manuals may also need to be developed.
Quality control
Recently marketers and service business have been paying a lot of attention to improving service quality through Total Quality Management, even produces basic commodities have customer service concerns that are part of the overall marketing plans (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007).
Service improvement is harder to implement than improvement in physical products, and one reason is that server is inseparable from the service. The best ways to improve service is to train people and then empower them to the server. Empowerment is giving employees the authority to correct a problem without checking with management, line level employees are much closer to problems, by giving them the power to correct problems is a way to improve customer satisfaction.
There are several aspects that the product manager can do to make the implementation of quality improvement efforts more successful. Managers must lead the quality effort their actions and involvement, TQM won’t work without top-level support (Yahaya S Y, Abu-Bakar N, 2007). Firms that are successful clearly specified jobs and measure performance, the organisation must detail what tasks need to be done, how and by whom. Getting a return on quality is important. Therefore, the managers must take care to deal with the most critical customer satisfaction issues in order to control
costs.
1.7 Conclusion
New product introduction process includes a transformation of a good idea into a commercial product or service through a series of stage gate process. These stages or phases of work are designed to minimise risk while optimising the innovation projects to deliver the most value to the organisation, because of the structure of the new product development process, a project can be halted at any of the gates or decision points throughout the duration of the project. Each stage of work is value-added for completeness and is planned for the next stage of work is validated against a predetermined set of criteria in order for a project to pass the gate.
Strategically a firm must address all projects to fit with customer needs and industry trends. Product categories help to framed development work by matching industry growth trends with target customer needs. Senior management is responsible for determining the innovation strategy in terms of markets and technologies as well as product categories.