"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)