Product Development Metrics Portfolios

Product development metrics are now numerous and have expanded to measure many different areas. Spending, revenue, profit, return on innovation, launch rate, productivity, and others measure overall corporate-level results. Projects measure time-to-market, time-to-profit, BET, slip rate, target unit cost and price and profit accuracy, volume accuracy, and other parameters. Products in development get measured on requirements and/or specification changes, first-pass success, number of builds, change orders, tests failed, and a host of lower level measures. Functions measure training levels, competency, output, budget accuracy, and more. Oh, and of course there is the emerging set of portfolio measures for products, projects, and technologies and their related intellectual property measures.

And yes, this is progress. The proficiency of product developers and management to measure the process and results of investments in R&D has risen steadily since 1990. There are many measures and many measurers, soon many systems. Progress leads to complexity and then to simplification. If you are knee deep in metrics complexity, or searching for the right metrics for your organization, this "everything-on-the-table" workshop offers method to sort through all the chaos and determine a "right set of metrics" for R&D. While research and advanced development metrics are on the table, this abbreviated pre-conference version of the two-day program will realistically center on product development environments.

The goal of the workshop will be to develop a set of metrics suitable for measurement of R&D as a whole by the company CEO and VP R&D that makes sense to everyone in the organization. The Linked Metrics Portfolio method creates a scorecard of twenty something metrics that provide for measurement of: the R&D investment as a whole, the individual project investments and their resultant new products, functional expertise and contribution, and improvement projects undertaken by the organization. After opening remarks, 12 something areas where there are numerous metrics will each receive about 15 minutes of attention. Attendees will be encouraged to suggest additional metrics in each area that are not in the handout materials for consideration later in the day by the working groups. In the afternoon, attendees will work in groups to create a set of metrics for their R&D environment. With different companies participating, attendees will be asked to choose groups according the their company's type of R&D strategy: Innovators, Innovator-Extender, Balanced, Followers-Extenders-Reducers. If 4-5 people from the same company attend, they can form their own group and maybe end the day with a set of metrics to recommend to their company. Specialty industry concentrations may also wish to break into their own groups. Success is completing with day with a set of metrics measuring corporate-level overall results, projects and products, functions, and improvement projects in a way that spans top to bottom of the R&D organization when in makes sense to do so. The Linked Metrics Portfolio method is said to outperform metrics assembled on a dashboard and other popular scorecard methods.