Projects

Setting up a stage and gate project manually adds an extra burden on project leaders, and reduces the consistency and quality of projects in your portfolio.

Using disjointed tools like spreadsheets, shared document folders and MS Project to manage project information increases the burden on project teams even more, further reducing quality and productivity.

Our software automates the setup of entire stage & gated projects, using configurable stage & gate templates. Once created, project leaders can then modify their projects as required.  Other types of project template can also be defined (capital, six sigma, IT, etc.) to provide a single system for all your project management needs.

Successful product development relies on producing the right information at the right time, to de-risk projects, make gate decisions and launch products on time.

Our software enables project teams to identify deliverables that need to be completed at each stage, plan the work to a realistic timeline, and use online forms and document templates to capture essential information.  Teams then track progress and adjust the project plan to reflect additional work or time needed to complete a high-quality stage.

Project leaders are often asked: How much will the next stage cost?  What resources will you need? Will you be within budget? How profitable will the project be?

Our software provides the tools for project leaders to answer these questions quickly and reliably.  Project leaders estimate work needed from different resources types, and track how much actual work was done using integrated time sheets. Project teams estimate capital and expenses by stage or task, and track actual spend by importing data from your financial system.  Labor costs are automatically calculated by applying labor rates to planned and actual hours worked.

We also include a full project business case to calculate key financial metrics such as NPV, IRR, payback period and profitability index. See our Product Business Case for more information.

Risk and uncertainty are inherent to innovation, so a project team should be proactive in identifying, quantifying and controlling project risk.

Our software helps you identify risks and maintain a risk register. Evaluate each risk by its impact and probability and calculate a severity score to prioritize mitigation and contingency actions.  Use scorecards to assess overall probability of technical and commercial success and factor that in to your project de-risking activities and financial projections.

Ensuring your gates ‘have teeth’, as Dr Robert Cooper puts it, is one of the essential elements of a good development process.  If your gate decisions never kill, rework or hold projects, then your stage & gate process will be ineffective.

Our software enables you to schedule gate meetings on a timely basis, prompting gatekeepers to review gate deliverables prior to the meeting. Gatekeepers complete online gate checklists, scorecards and votes, and assess risks, red flags, schedule and resources for the next stage. Finally, gatekeepers set gate status to Go, Hold, Rework or Kill, according to agreed criteria, empowering project teams to take the resulting actions.

Project delays are often caused by stage deliverables being poorly coordinated. Team members often have assignments from different projects, and may not be aware of the relative urgency of each task. So they miss deadlines, or rush the work to deliver a lower quality result.

Our software helps project leaders assign work to cross-functional teams – establishing clear accountability for each deliverable. Team members view their prioritized work deadlines across all projects and complete deliverables using online forms or attachments. Communicate quickly using our online ‘social wall’ for discussions. Update project risks, issues and red flags, as well as submit time sheets for the work performed. Receive automated email alerts for late tasks, deliverables risks and issues.

Some leading companies are introducing agile software development concepts into their stage & gate processes. When done well, this can lead to faster, more flexible and ultimately more successful product launches.

Our software supports an agile stage & gate project process, retaining the benefits of a structured development methodology with the advantages of agile development techniques.

Communicating project progress and issues can be a time-consuming process.  Team members need to communicate status to Project Leaders, who in turn need to keep gatekeepers, steering committees and other project stakeholders informed on a weekly or monthly cycle.

Our software automates this reporting process, ensuring that accurate and relevant information is shared on a timely basis.  reports can be viewed online, generated automatically as predefined PowerPoint decks or PDFs that can be automatically emailed to stakeholders.