Phase Gates - How Many is Too Many?
by Curt Raschke, Senior Member, Technical Staff,
Texas Instruments What's the best way to use
project phases and gates as part of a formal NPD process? Recently a heated online
discussion on this topic took place among members of the Project
Management Institute (PMI) NPD SIG Yahoo Group1.
It seemed that every industry and company represented in the discussion used a phase gate
process of some sort, but there was a wide variation on the number and purpose of the
phases and phase reviews. In addition, some of the companies followed standard commercial
phase gate process templates (e.g. PACETM or Stage-GateTM) very
closely. Some of the others used company specific tailored versions of the commercial
templates and some had their own unique variations. For those readers who may have missed
the discussion, let me summarize how my company, Texas Instruments, approaches these
various issues.
My company has six major business groups with new product
development team activities spread out all over the world in ten major development sites
and numerous satellite sites. Within each major business group there are between five and
twelve related product groups. We are very focused on New Product Development since the
vast majority of our approximately 10B USD in revenue comes from products released to
market in the last three years. Each of the different business groups uses a phase gate
development process. Each one of the processes is a slightly different tailored version of
the PACETM process, with each version having between 4 and 7 phases and
associated phase gates reviews.
This is not to say that these phase gate reviews are the only
reviews utilized in the various processes. Within each phase there are project technical
reviews, technical peer reviews, management status reviews, team status reviews, and
special purpose project reviews (e.g. risk management reviews, manufacturability reviews,
project boundary agreement reviews, etc.) What we have found is that it is very important
not to intermix these various other reviews with the phase gate reviews and to keep the
purpose of the phase gate review firmly focused and controlled.
The phases, and hence the phase reviews, are set up to
correspond to the hand-off of the major project responsibility from one group of
specialists on the project team to another. Examples of such handoffs for our projects are
marketing to product feature definition, product feature definition to project planning,
product design to prototype manufacturing, and prototype characterization to full scale
manufacturing. For any given business group these handoffs occur a limited (and
predictable) number of times, resulting in a limited (and predictable) number of phases.
Within the phases, however, the other types of reviews can vary from product group to
product group and sometimes from project to project within a product group.
The major reason for the differences between product groups
in the number of phases, then, is due to differences in the way that the groups organize
their new product development teams. For those teams that are organized in the way that
the handoff between groups corresponds to that of the traditional PACETM
template, the number of phases comes out to the five traditional PACETM phases.
These phases are Concept Evaluation (phase 0), Planning & Specification (phase 1),
Development (phase 2), Evaluation (phase 3), and Product Release (phase 4).
However, if the development teams are arranged so those
handoffs between groups of specialists occur less often or more often, the number of
phases decrease or increase accordingly. For example, if the product is being developed
for a specific customer, the first two phases (Concept Evaluation and Planning &
Specification) generally become combined into a single phase that includes customer
negotiation. Another example occurs when the Evaluation phase includes significant
sampling of prototype product to customers. If different groups of specialists do the
internal and external evaluations, the single evaluation phase gets split into two
sequential evaluation phases.
Regardless of the number of phases, however, the purpose of
each phase review is to make a management decision on whether or not the project should
continue to the next phase. If the review determines that the project is not ready to move
to the next phase, then the outcomes of the review are to identify the corrective actions
needed to move to the next phase, to redirect the project before moving to the next phase,
or to kill it entirely. Thus, for example, you don't want a major technical review as part
of the phase review. If you do, you tend to end up talking about whether you did things
right, rather than whether you did the right things. The results of the various technical
reviews should be included in phase review, but not the reviews themselves.
1 To Join the PMI NPD SIG Yahoo
Group, go to www.pmi.org to download an application.
Once you are a member, simply go to http://groups.yahoo.com/
and apply to join the PMI_NPD_Sig group. |
