• Effectiveness in product development
    • Effectiveness is the ability to develop a product of the requisite quality. 
    • Effectiveness is fundamentally about learning – the ability of the project team to:
      1. acquire the information they need – customer feedback, for example,
      2. assimilate it and combine it with their existing knowledge; and,
      3. apply the knowledge they have generated to developing the new product. 
  • Efficiency in product development  
    • Efficiency is the ability to use the right resources to launch a product at the right time.
    • Resourcing for efficiency involves assigning enough people with the knowledge and experience for effectiveness and the required equipment and facilities to complete the project in a desirable time. 
  • Effectiveness and efficiency are connected
    • An experienced project team will be able to go through the cycles of acquire – assimilate – apply required for effectiveness more efficiently (that is, in a shorter time) than a less experienced team.  Which illustrates the importance of assigning the ‘right’ resources to a project for both effectiveness and efficiency.
  • Having ‘Enough’ people is critical
    • Too few of the right people will result in longer time-to-market and adding additional people (more than ‘enough’) will not decrease time-to-market because the time taken for some tasks cannot be reduced by additional people working on them.