Join us at the Minnesota Product Development and Management Association’s September meeting to understand “innovating at the speed of teams.”
Concurrent Product Development (i.e. Concurrent Engineering) is a popular topic. One hears a lot about AGILE, SCRUM and other software that shortens time-to-market. Software and processes can help document and make innovation flow more uniformly and with less risk, but all processes work at the speed of the team, regardless of technology or team experience. These small, dedicated teams must be closely knit, open-minded, detail-oriented, customer-centric, and deadline-driven, always with the end goal in mind.
Understanding, obtaining and refining an effective process is important, but having high-performance teams is essential to ensuring success and increasing speed to market.
High-performance teams are the core of success for Concurrent Product Development, AGILE, any project, and any organization.
High-performance teams address each of these key areas to ensure speed to market:
- Goals and Objectives – They have short-term, continuous high-priority goals and objectives. They divide projects into short-, mid- and long-term goals, much like AGILE, with short-term being less than 30 days, and occasionally as short as one. They also strive for continuous improvement from both a technical/technological and interpersonal perspective.
- Roles and Responsibilities – They have clear differentiation of roles to ensure absence of turf wars and to eliminate issues that may affect team cohesiveness and performance.
- Barrier Identification – They identify barriers to people, processes and structures and develop contingency plans around the barriers.
- Interpersonal relationships – They teams value differences and develop versatility plans. They understand behavior styles and personalities and utilize that understanding to better communicate and work as a team.
High-performance teams require a high level of training, expertise and cohesion, often requiring teams to work together for years.
Most often, high-performance teams can provide faster and better results in significantly less time. The key is finding the right team members with the needed skills and the desire to stay with the team for an extended period of time.
It is possible to have high-performance teams that have frequent new participants, but results and performance can be lesser than that of a long-term, cohesive team.
Regardless of time together, applying the best practices in this seminar will ensure better and faster results.
Join us September 14th to understand the value of teamwork and the success it can bring to innovation and new product development strategies.
For more information, please contact Rob Beachy, CTO at Axiom: rbeachy@axiomcom.com.