The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

2.3. Strategy Implementation

Implementation issues fall into three categories: people, processes, and politics. Successful implementation of a new product strategy can often be more difficult than putting together the strategy.

2.3.1. People

A proverb states, "Show me and I will forget. Teach me and I will remember. Include me and I will understand." The people charged with doing the development work should be included in the work of building a product protocol or a value proposition. Doing so means more effective trade-off decisions during development.

Individuals have work habits and judgmental biases formed by their formal training or learned in past development projects. Each new product strategy means a change in work habits. Understanding the strategy behind a new product's development can produce productive change in ingrained work habits.

Beyond work habits, personality differences and diverse backgrounds in people can either strengthen or impede implementation of a strategy. Through training, teams composed of people of different personality types and mixed experiences can form development teams that are more cohesive and effective than homogeneous teams. (See Chapter 9.)

Another people problem is assigning individuals to development groups without considering the time or motivation they have to focus on implementation.

The middle managers studied here typically complained that a new implementation effort required additional demands on their time, with no relief from ...