Change: embrace it, don't deny it: tools and techniques inspired by software development can introduce the flexibility needed to make changes during product development with minimal disruption

Research-Technology Management, July-August, 2008 by Preston G. Smith

Strong teams are vital to flexibility because a turbulent environment presents much bigger communication and coordination challenges than a stable one, and high-performance teams are the prime means of coping with these challenges.

Make Decisions at the Last Responsible Moment

If you dissect a product development project to see what occurs inside, you will find that the core activity is decision making--thousands of little decisions that cumulatively create the product. It follows that you should concentrate on this "inner loop" of the process if you wish to improve product development. For instance, if you want to speed it up, find ways, such as co-location, to accelerate decision making, as programmers do when they find the inner loop of their code and rewrite it in a low-level language that runs faster.

Alternatively, if you wish to be more flexible, find ways to make decisions more flexibly. A major opportunity here is not to make a decision until you must make it--what we call making decisions at the last responsible moment. This might seem like procrastination, which is basically being lazy about a decision, but it is actually a proactive process of identifying when the decision must be made and scheduling it, then proceeding to collect information to help make a better decision when its last responsible moment arrives.

Making decisions at the last responsible moment has two advantages. First--most importantly for flexibility--it keeps your options open longer, and second, it allows you to make the decision using fresher information. However, there are some decisions, such as ones where the outcome is not likely to change or where the outcomes are nearly equal, that you should make early so you can dismiss them.

Although this delayed decision-making may seem obvious, it is not the way management normally operates. Managers usually are paid to make decisions, not to put them off. In contrast, managers at Toyota are paid to delay decisions (10).

Note that popular phased development processes tend to force organizations into making many decisions unnecessarily at the project's outset in order to "nail things down." Unfortunately, these nailed-down items constitute a loss of flexibility.

Plan Piecemeal and Constantly Consider Risk

Project management has become quite popular over the past decade. However, the project management profession has its roots in the construction industry where predictability is valued highly and major change is relatively uncommon. Consequently, you must handle project management quite differently when change is the norm. I mention just two areas to refocus:

Project planning presents a dilemma for projects undergoing heavy change. The temptation is to replan the project in response to change, but this can lead to paying constant attention to replanning rather than to developing the product itself. When turbulence is high, you can shift to two other means of planning. One is rolling-wave planning, in which you plan the next segment in detail and leave the rest of the project planned only at the top level. As you progress, the wave rolls forward and the next segment undergoes detail planning. This way, you are not investing much in long-term plans that are likely to change anyway.