MVP Finalist Profile

Read Terry Vance's Interview on FastTrack

Accomplishments

Terry established and led the corporate Product Development Effectiveness (PDE) team to address new product development performance across all business units around the world. One element of this effort included the development of new metrics to measure the new product development performance of each business unit. These metrics initially included basic development performance (projects with requirements, projects with phase reviews, requirements changes by phase, percent of development resources allocated by project type, etc). He later expanded these metrics to include patent filings per $million of R&D and new product (developed in last 3 years) percentage of revenue. In addition, he developed a quality scorecard metric (customer complaints, cost of returned goods, and field failures) for determining whether quality is improving or degenerating within a business unit. This scorecard was adopted and reviewed quarterly by the corporate senior staff (CEO & his direct reports). Terry led the establishment and implementation of a product development performance assessment tool that measured business unit performance against over 250 best practices in 28 process areas.

Impact

Under Terry’s direction, the success of each initiative was measured by its impact on the business unit culture and performance. The implementation of the product development metrics rapidly changed development performance, which was usually reflected in the metrics within six months. One example of improvement included the number of projects with requirements increasing from <60-percent to >90-percent within six months. After the completion of this effort and adoption by the business units, new product revenue increased from 24-percent to 46-percent of total sales.

Biggest Success

Terry is most proud of “the positive change in the overall product development culture within ADC. The bottom line has been an increased level of product development discipline with rigorous development processes in place across all business units moving the corporation maturity level from a Process Level 2 (informal, decentralized, easily circumvented PDP) to a Level 4 (one visible, documented, adaptable, formal PDP). This required overcoming business unit short-term priorities and NIH factors. I personally feel my ability to obtain collaboration across organizationally and technically diverse teams has been a key component of this success.”

Methodology and Lessons Learned

The challenging issues addressed by Terry were the different needs of the business units and continued commitment by the business units. He addressed the different needs, for example, by structuring the PDP Framework to be flexible. This was done by determining what was required for the largest and most complex development projects and then allowing the project teams to select deliverables and even phases that are required for each project on a project-by-project basis. He and his team created a menu of deliverables within the development phases as well as a vocabulary of terminology within the corporation.

Terry’s lessons learned include: support must come from the top down and the bottom up to accomplish a process change across numerous organizational boundaries; the objective must be clear; the scope must be limited; collaboration must be driven by the team leader through solicited involvement of all team members; and the team members must have had negative experiences that motivate them to seek out better ways to accomplish their goals.

Influence

Michael H. Day, Vice President of Technology and Strategy and Chief Technology Officer, ADC Telecommunications, says that “Terry’s work on measuring and improving product delivery effectiveness, through innovative metrics, project management discipline and best practices assessment was a remarkable body of work that made a significant impact on ADC during difficult times. In addition to his energy and innovation, Terry has a great attitude that helps to inspire engineering teams to higher levels of performance, and he has demonstrated a long-term commitment to continuous, reciprocal learning throughout his career and certainly over the past 10 years at ADC.”