Presentation to joint INCOSE / ASQ meeting in Colorado Springs, Jan 8, 2014.
Abstract:
Bringing innovative products to market has many challenges, but few as tough as understanding and addressing changing market needs. Product Managers can receive thousands of product enhancement requests and need a way to rapidly filter and prioritize these to achieve a clear and concise set of product requirements. These requirements will span systems, software, and hardware engineering. Managing changes to requirements across a lifecycle that crosses multiple engineering disciplines adds to the complexity. In this session we'll look at the role of customer-contributed Ideas in forming and prioritizing Product Management decisions.
Driving Behavioral Change for Information Management through Data-Driven Gree...
Ideas to Requirements in the Product Engineering Lifecycle
1. IDEAS TO REQUIREMENTS IN THE PRODUCT
ENGINEERING LIFECYCLE
Mills Ripley
ALM Customer Solutions Director for North America, PTC Inc.
2. AGENDA
•
Introductions
•
Product Management Opportunities and Challenges
•
Definitions – Ideation and Idea Management
•
Context – Ideation, Requirements, Application Lifecycle Management
•
Example – Idea Management Customer Community Portal
•
Q&A
3. INNOVATION AND QUALITY DRIVE MARKETLEADING PRODUCTS
High quality, innovative products increase market share and revenue
Innovative processes improve quality and accelerate time to market
while decreasing cost and risk
3
5. IDEATION IS ABOUT TECHNIQUES THAT
GENERATE IDEAS
From our friends at Wikipedia…
• Ideation is an emerging buzzword (c. 2004) representing the creative process of
generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is
understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or
abstract. As such, it is an essential part of the design process, both in education
and practice.
• Ideation can be contrasted with brainstorming in that brainstorming is a specific
instance of ideation. Brainstorming employs specific rules (such as disallowing any
contributor to negate any idea offered during a brainstorming session), while
ideation encompasses all techniques that generate ideas.
• Several large companies, like Starbucks and Best Buy, have opened up this
process to their customers, inviting anyone to raise new ideas for possible company
products using dedicated idea management software open on the Internet.
7. SYSTEM CLASSES & RELATIONSHIPS
Community
Member
1
0..*
Release
Idea
0..*
1
0..*
0..*
0..*
Customer
Rating
Need Date
Customer
Deliverable
*
Fulfilled by
Product
Requirement
Satisfied by
Functional
Spec
Validated by
Test Case
10. IDEA MANAGEMENT – COMMUNITY
PERSPECTIVE
•
Objectives
• Idea Search
• Idea Submission
• Idea Collaboration (edit and comment)
• Idea Rating
•
Value
• Influence product direction by creating and rating ideas
• Communicate with other community members as well as product management
• Track the status of “my” ideas
12. IDEA MANAGEMENT – PRODUCT MANAGER
PERSPECTIVE
•
Objectives
• Analyze ideas using value and cost data
• Capture additional value and cost data from internal roles
• Perform opportunity analysis to determine if ideas support market opportunities
• Show how ideas are grouped into customer deliverables
• Flowdown Ideas to Customer Deliverables to Requirements…
•
Value
• Ideas are evaluated and related to other lifecycle assets - critical for planning, impact
analysis, rolling-up metrics and monitoring progress
• Real-time metrics and analysis improves alignment to customer needs, product
deliverables, and business outcomes
14. NOTES ON VALUATION CRITERIA
•
These are just a sampling of common criteria
• Customer Value
• Strategic Value
• Sales Value
• Estimated Cost
•
Can be single value criteria or composite criteria based on multiple choice questions with
assigned values and weightings (quite simple to implement)
•
Value and costs data can be captured role by role through a workflow that is as simple or
intricate as needed
•
Real-time dashboards enable informed and timely decisions
15. IDEA MANAGEMENT IS ABOUT INNOVATION AND
PRODUCT IMPROVEMENT
•
Idea Management can significantly improve product requirements, but that alone does not
guarantee the improvement of products
•
Product Improvement also involves:
• Ensuring traceability from ideas to requirements to tests and test results to ensure we
are actually building what we set out to build
• Enabling reuse across the lifecycle ensures that validated and proven sets of assets are
propagated
• Tracking progress and quality metrics throughout development
• Automating and enforcing proven workflows
16. SUMMARY
Build the Right Thing
Community inputs & rates ideas
Release
Community
Member
Idea
Customer and Market Ratings – “How important
is this to key customers and markets?”
“When do they need this deliverable?”
“If a deliverable slips, who is going to be upset
and how upset will they be?”
Ideas Evaluated & Rationalized “What is the strategic value, sales value,
community value, level of effort…?”
“How are ideas related?”
Rating
Need Date
Customer
Deliverable
Fulfilled by
Customer
Product
Requirement
Ideas Formalized – “What do
we need to build?”
Real Time Test Status –
“Am I Ready to
Release?”
Satisfied by
Ideas Executed – “How do
we need to build it?”
Build the Thing Right
Release Planning
– “When Should I
Release?”
Functional
Spec
Validated by
Test Case
