The most important PD activity you're not formalizing

To produce a winning product you need 3 things:

1. Understanding of stakeholders wants, environment, assumptions, priorities and what is feasible
2. Sharing the vision
3. Staying on course

Change of direction is probably the single largest factor in cost and schedule overruns. Typically, 80% of all defects are inserted in the planning and requirements phase. The beginning is most important. As you move down the sequence of events in PD, the leverage of activities for success becomes more difficult and adds increasing complexity. Leveraging good requirements up-front is the single most effective activity for successful product launch. Spending time in design, development, testing and pilot is relevant and necessary, but leveraging the time spent in requirments definition will pay off many times more than hastily rushing into design and on.

The Requirement process is a fairly easy process to formalize and structure in your overall PD process. The steps in the Requirement process are:

1. Define the scope - identify Needs, Goals and Objectives
2. Create operational concepts
3. Involve all stakeholders in writing requirements at system, assembly and component levels
4. Define test and verification methods

Bad requirments cause cost overruns, schedule slips, frustrated employees, unhappy customers and lost profitability. Bad requirements come from incorrect information, omissions, poorly written and ambiguities. They occur because most people don't know how to write requirments, too little time is spent defining the project before requirments are written and too many assumptions are made without verifying with stakeholders. Little time is allocated for writing and reviewing requirments. There is no incentive to write good requirements because engineers want to design what they think stakeholders want.

Essentials for good quality requirements include:

• Clear vision
• Necessary resources dedicated to generating and reviewing requirements
• Well-defined processes
• Educated personnel
• Accountability

Good quality requirements will reduce PD and project time, reduce paperwork, reduce ambiguity, detail a clear vision, motivate resources and produce a winning product.