Speed-to-Market Relies on R&D Efficiency and Effectiveness
pgermeraad
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:
acquire the information they need – customer feedback, for example,
assimilate it and combine it with their existing knowledge; and,
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.
