Improving Your Company’s Velocity – Practice, Practice, Practice
Posted on February 7, 2008
Filed Under Leadership, Management, Organization & Culture, Quantum Leaders, Strategy Execution, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Not only is it a way to get to Carnegie Hall, but focused, repeated practice of your firm’s best business processes is one of the ways to improve your overall velocity. In sports, it’s called establishing “muscle memory” by the repeated execution of a golf or tennis swing (for example), first working on the proper mechanics via slow, fluidic repititions, gradually increasing speed as the body learns how it all comes together.
So too can organizations learn to improve it’s overall velocity while still flawlessly executing on it’s processes. I witnessed this first hand when I implemented a stage-gate product development process at Fujitsu Business Communications Systems close to a decade ago. Overall time-to-market across the various product lines were abysmal. Even worse, product releases were being done in a haphazard, inconsistent manner (based on the idiosyncrasies of each product manager), resulting in poor product performance in terms of time-to-volume.
Initial resistance to a disciplined product lifecycle management process was strong from all quarters – especially from the product managers who railed against process as an inhibitor to velocity – and who were also somewhat daunted by the responsibility of leading and driving their teams through the behavioral changes the process implied.
The first few times the product teams went through the process were fraught with the frictions, false starts, and other inefficiencies that are part of the learning process. However, as the product managers and product team members grew to better understand not only the specific deliverables, but more importantly the behaviors expected of them as team participants, the timeframes contracted quickly, resulting not only in higher overall velocity (time to market), but the level of support for products at introduction improved remarkably such that time to volumes also substantially improved.
Gregg Gallagher
Director, Marketing & Innovation Practice
Quantum Leaders, Inc
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I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.
Sue:
Thanks, and have subscribed to your feed as well. Note Norm’s earlier posts on Spiritual Intelligence resonates with your own thinking….