10th Annual Metrics Conference | MVP Awards | Metrics Handbook | Articles & White Papers

Benchmarking, Surveys & Metrics, Methodologies & Best Practices—This report presents six leading practices related to product development/R&D metrics derived from practitioner experience and benchmarking research. The editors of Knowledge Roundtable, Management Roundtable’s online networking and knowledge service, have culled and formulated these practices as simple, actionable, bullet-level statements. In addition, the 13-page guide cites the source for each practice, presents a brief discussion of each, and provides links to further information.

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The amount of things a company can measure is so vast that it is difficult to know where to focus, or to know which areas will reveal the best opportunities to meet the corporate agenda. In this report, MIT Professor, John Hauser, describes a mathematical model developed at that university's Center for Innovation in Product Development (CIPD), which can act as a kind of business thermostat, telling an organization where to focus strategic priorities to produce the greatest benefit. Results are given for the test run of this model with a real company's data.

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National Semiconductor provides a textbook case of how R&D metrics can evolve from the simplest cost-tracking measurements to driving a relatively sophisticated learning organization. National's experience shows how metrics and process improvement can work together to help guide an organization, step-by-step, from one level of process maturity to another. Along the way, National learned a great deal about how metrics can drive behavioral change; how to gain acceptance at both the senior management and engineering team level; and how an emphasis on learning can accelerate improvement activities.

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In this commentary, Brad Goldense defines the approach for creating a metric that shows the degree of linkage between R&D and corporate strategy. Using a deceptively simple method, Goldense shows how to draw data from respective metrics sets and combine them to provide new information that could be significant to corporate strategy and policy deployment. Goldense also draws from his firm's survey data to show the degree to which most companies are tracking this information.

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The explosion of information and information technology has led to a new vision of product
development as a highly disaggregated process with people and organizations spread throughout the world. Top managers are faced with the challenge of coordinating a process that might entail
hundreds of people solving thousands of engineering problems and facing millions of decisions – just to design a product for maximum profit. Top management directs this process by establishing the culture and incentives of the organization. Specifically, management selects strategic “metrics” such as customer satisfaction, time-to-market, and platform reuse. Hiring practices, training regimens, process design, tool-and-method development, leadership, and other top-management actions lead to an implicit set of priorities with respect to these metrics. If the priorities are set correctly, the product-development teams, each acting in their own best interests, will take the actions necessary to do well on these metrics and, in doing so, maximize profit. In this paper we develop and apply a practical adaptive-control methodology to help top
management adjust the priorities on the strategic product development metrics.

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