"P" Flashcards
Pareto Chart
A bar graph with the bars sorted in descending order used to identify the largest opportunity for improvement. Pareto charts distinguish the “vital few” from the “useful many.”
Participatory Design
A democratic approach to design that does not simply make potential users the subjects of user testing, but empowers them to be a part of the design and decision-making process.
Payback
The time, usually in years, from some point in the development process until the commercialized product or service has recovered its costs of development and marketing. While some firms take the point of full-scale market introduction of a new product as the starting point, others begin the clock at the start of development expense.
Payout
The amount of profits and their timing expected from commercializing a new product.
Perceptual Mapping
A quantitative market research tool used to understand how customers think of current and future products. Perceptual maps are visual representations of the positions that sets of products hold in consumers’ minds.
Performance Indicators
Criteria on which the performance of a new product in the market are evaluated. (See Chapter 29 of The PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition).
Performance Measurement System
The system that enables the firm to monitor the relevant performance indicators of new products in the appropriate time frame.
Performance/Satisfaction Surveys
A particular type of market research tool in which respondents are asked to evaluate how well a particular product or service is performing and/or how satisfied they are with that product or service on a specific list of attributes. It is often useful to ask respondents to evaluate more than one product or service on these attributes in order to be able to compare them and to better understand what they like and dislike about one versus the other. In this way, this information can become a key input to the development process for next generation product modifications.
PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)
An event-oriented network analysis technique used to estimate project duration when there is a high degree of uncertainty in estimates of duration times for individual activities.
Phase Review Process
A staged product development process in which first one function completes a set of tasks, then passes the information they generated sequentially to another function which in turn completes the next set of tasks and then passes everything along to the next function. Multifunctional teamwork is largely absent in these types of product development processes, which may also be called baton-passing processes. Most firms have moved from these processes to Stage-GateÔ processes using multifunctional teams.
Physical Elements
The components that make up a product. These can be both components (or individual parts) in addition to minor subassemblies of components.
Pilot Gate Meeting
A trial, informal gate meeting usually held at the launch of a Stage-Gate™ process to test the design of the process and familiarize participants with the Stage-Gate™ process.
Pipeline (product pipeline)
The scheduled stream of products in development for release to the market.
Pipeline Alignment
The balancing of project demand with resource supply. (See Chapter 5 in The PDMA HandBook 1st Edition and Chapter 3 in The PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition.)
Pipeline Inventory
Production of a new product that has not yet been sold to end consumers, but which exists within the distribution chain.
Pipeline Loading
The volume and time phasing of new products in various stages of development within an organization.
Pipeline Management
A process that integrates product strategy, project management, and functional management to continually optimize the cross-project management of all development-related activities. (See Chapter 5 in The PDMA HandBook 1st Edition and Chapter 3 in The PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition.)
Pipeline Management Enabling Tools
The decision-assistance and data-handling tools that aid managing the pipeline. The decision-assistance tools allow the pipeline team to systematically perform trade-offs without losing sight of priorities. The data-handling tools deal with the vast amount of information needed to analyze project priorities, understand resource and skillset loads, and perform pipeline analysis.
Pipeline Management Process
Consists of three elements; pipeline management teams, a structured methodology and enabling tools.
Pipeline Management Teams
The teams of people at the strategic, project and functional levels responsible for resolving pipeline issues.
Platform Product
The design and components that are shared by a set of products in a product family. From this platform, numerous derivative products can be designed. (See also product platform)
Platform Roadmap
A graphical representation of the current and planned evolution of products developed by the organization, showing the relationship between the architecture and features of different generations of products.
Porter’s Five Forces
Analysis framework developed by Michael Porter in which a company is evaluated based on its capabilities versus competitors, suppliers, customers, barriers to entry, and the threat of substitutes. (See Porter, Michael. 1998. Competitive Strategy. The Free Press)
Portfolio
Commonly referred to as a set of projects or products that a company is investing in and making strategic trade-offs against. (See also project portfolio and product portfolio)
Portfolio Criteria
The set of criteria against which the business judges both proposed and currently active product development projects to create a balanced and diverse mix of ongoing efforts.
Portfolio Management
A business process by which a business unit decides on the mix of active projects, staffing and dollar budget allocated to each project currently being undertaken. See also pipeline management. (See Chapter 13 of The PDMA ToolBook 1 and Chapter 3 of The PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition.)
PM is a decision-making process, utilized in conjunction with the NPD process to help senior management strategically align and prioritize projects to add the most value to the firm while optimizing scare resources (people, time, money and equipment)
Portfolio Map
A chart or graph which graphically displays the relative scalar strength and weakness of a portfolio of products, or competitors in two orthogonal dimensions of customer value or other parameters. Typical portfolio maps include “Price vs. performance”, Newness to company vs. newness to market; Risk vs. return.
Portfolio Rollout Scenarios
hypothetical illustrations of the number and magnitude of new products that would need to be launched over a certain time frame to reach the desired financial goals; accounts for success/failure rates and considers company and competitive benchmarks.
Portfolio Team
a short-term, cross-functional, high-powered team focused on shaping the concepts and business cases for a portfolio of new product concepts within a market, category, brand or business to be launched over a 2-5 year time period, depending on the pace of the industry.
Pre-Production Unit
A product that looks like and acts like the intended final product, but is made either by hand or in pilot facilities rather than by the final production process.
Preliminary Bill of Materials (PBOM)
A forecasted listing of all the subassemblies, intermediate parts, raw materials, and engineering design, tool design, and customer inputs that are expected to go into a parent assembly showing the quantity of each required to make an assembly.
Process Champion
The person responsible for the daily promotion of and encouragement to use a formal business process throughout the organization. They are also responsible for the ongoing training, innovation input and continuous improvement of the process.
He or she pushes the NPD process as a vehicle for product, service, and Program Innovation.
Visible, Trusted, Respected, Admired
Process Managers
The operational managers responsible for ensuring the orderly and timely flow of ideas and projects through the process.
The keeper of the NPD process. He or she is the process expert with responsibility to promote and improve the NPD processes. The process manager will instruct NPD teams on process subtleties and guidelines as well as defending the NPD process through proper evaluation of metrics.
Promoter, Improver, Defender, Teacher
Process Map
A workflow diagram that uses an x-axis for process time and a y-axis that shows participants and tasks.
Process Mapping
The act of identifying and defining all of the steps, participants, inputs, outputs, and decisions associated with completing any particular process.
Process Maturity Level
The amount of movement of a reengineered process from the “as-is” map, which describes how the process operated initially, to the “should-be” map of the desired future state of the operation.
Process Owner
The executive manager responsible for the strategic results of the NPD process. This includes process throughput, quality of output, and participation within the organization. (See Section 3 of The PDMA ToolBook for 4 tools that process owners might find useful, and see Chapter 5 of The PDMA HandBook.)
Process Re-engineering
A discipline to measure and modify organizational effectiveness by documenting, analyzing, and comparing an existing process to “best-in-class” practice, and then implementing significant process improvements or installing a whole new process.
Product
Term used to describe all goods, services, and knowledge sold. Products are bundles of attributes (features, functions, benefits, and uses) and can be either tangible, as in the case of physical goods, or intangible, as in the case of those associated with service benefits, or can be a combination of the two.
