Reforming the Development Process
By: Charles L. Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology
Wednesday May 23, 2007
Like so many other things, development (as in R&D) will have to be
rethought over and over again as we move deeper into the new century.
More people, more markets, more competition; new technologies, new
aspirations, new opportunities – nothing is stable for very long
anymore.
For a company or, for that matter, a lot of other organizations,
staying up with the competition will more and more be a matter of
achieving integrity (see the Innovation article Another Look at
Quality). And not a little of that will involve developing
fresh, intriguing, dominating concepts at a pace considered pretty
fast today.
In First Things First, I strongly advocated the division of the
development process into two distinct components. This allows
concentration on concept – what the product is – before
committing to all of the details that must be invented, designed and
approved in moving from concept to specification. A two-step
development process permits serious exploration of possibilities
unlikely to be considered if the concept is already a "given" at the
beginning of the process.
Metaplanning
Not unexpectedly, acceptance of a two-step development process
leads to specialization of the methods used for planning and designing.
For the designing part of the process, a number of methods have been
introduced and refined in recent years. The recognition that major improvements
can be made to products and services of all kinds by paying more attention to
users – through user-centered design – has led to a renaissance in
design methodology and a flowering of design research worldwide.
Similar interest has developed in methodology specialized for work at the
planning level – Structured Planning is an example. And as in-depth
attention to planning and design has grown, the development of new tools has
accelerated. The growing ease with which planners and designers now embrace
computer-supported methods is fueling the same kind of accelerated development
of software seen in other fields, and that has precipitated another interesting
organizational evolution: the appearance of a "metaplanning" function in the chain
of development.
For a producer at the front of the change curve, change is not
restricted to the products. Change is a permanent part of the process as well.
Driving the evolution of metaplanning in development is
the need to stay abreast of new methods and tools. Acquiring and
evaluating them as they appear, adapting them to the special needs
of the organization, learning how to use them, and training others
who will apply them has become a full-time job. Companies aware
of this are reflecting it in their organization structures: by
defining a group or department committed to the acquisition, maintenance,
customization and communication of planning and design methods and
tools – Metaplanning.
Given a commitment of human resources, it is only a short conceptual
step to implementing the complementary functions implicitly called for
in a metaplanning activity. Planning is done by teams, and the
teams will need resources, schedules, a planning process, training
and a charge or charter. This is a logical role for Metaplanning,
which can prepare ahead what is needed to launch and support the
planning teams.
The planning process will be custom fit to the needs of the organization
and the availability of new tools – the defining justification for
the metaplanning function in the first place. The need for establishing
the charge opens another need/opportunity for change. Depending on
the temporal distance a development activity is from the reality of
manufacturing engineering (or its equivalent in service-creating
organizations), its role will be more involved (when close) or less
involved (when far) with product specifics. At the maximum distance,
where metaplanning exists, the level of abstraction is greatest;
metaplanning is the process of planning the process.
This concept is sometimes a bit hard to grasp. For me, it is easiest
to explain by working backward through the development process.
I am working presently with the City of Chicago to help the city
prepare for climate change. Our problem at this stage is very much
a metaplanning problem, and it can be understood nicely by thinking
about what we might see in a hypothetical city already prepared for
the climate and weather extremes to be expected as climate change
takes hold. In the hypothetical city, we would see local mitigating
actions being taken – such as permeable paving surfaces being
installed to absorb rainwater runoff and rooftop gardens being planted
to cool buildings – preparing the city infrastructure for the effects
of intense storms, heat waves, power outages, drought and other
weather events. We would also see organizations, installations and
response mechanisms in place to react during the events to the
human tragedies and property damage still unavoidable, and we would
find plans for post-event restoration as well as feedback for improving
future responses. All these would be implementations – the results
of a thorough designing effort in the final phase of development.
Backing up, the designing phase would have followed from a planning
phase that would have identified the threats most likely for the
city and assembled ideas as system concepts appropriately planned
to take best advantage of the city's resources. Backing up again,
the creation of the planning process would have been the job of
metaplanning. Establishing how information on threats and possible
adaptations would be assembled, distilled into usable form,
structured to reveal relationships, and processed into policy directing
the course of implementation would be the metaplanning task.
For the corporation, the problem is similar – except that there is
competition and, therefore, the need for continuing metaplanning
as well as planning and designing. This mandates a reorganization
of the development function with three distinct functional phases
(Figure 1).
(Figure 1 Reformed Development; Parallel Interaction)
Reforming Development
Implementing a reformed development process creates a much more
agile advanced planning system able to seize opportunities almost
before they appear. Figure 1 diagrams the organization in the
context of strongly associated Research and Marketing functions
made substantially more effective by new possibilities for
relationship with Development.
The new agility is immediately evident. Whereas before, Research
and Development were more likely to be organized sequentially,
in the new model they operate in parallel with different relationships
at different stages – aligned with the three levels of development:
Metaplanning, Planning, and Designing. At the Metaplanning level,
the Research/Development relationship is concerned with emerging
technologies – technologies that the company may wish to investigate,
develop or acquire. Research staff will be actively probing basic
and applied research around the globe as it might have long-term
potential for the company. Metaplanning Development staff will
be asking "what if" questions by specifying the exploration of
promising technologies in new-concept planning projects.
Similar high level activity in Marketing will seek out changing trends
in society at home and abroad that could lead to promising new
product opportunities. Marketing staff will work at the level
of conference attendance, journal article analysis, and support of joint
ventures in social science research. Development staff will unite the
uncovered trends with emerging technologies in the planning projects
being composed.
At the level of Planning in Development, Research staff will be
concerned with matching functionality desired by planning teams with
technologies attainable in-house or available from outside sources.
Where appropriate, in-house technology being developed can be directed
toward evolving concepts. In Marketing, concept prototypes from
Planning will be market tested for appeal and feature approval.
Finally, at the level of Designing, the more conventional relationships
between Research, Development and Marketing will surface. Solutions to
technical problems beyond design engineering are the responsibility
of Research, and market reactions to the subtleties of detailed
prototypes are the business of Marketing.
Escalator Delivery
The reformed development process smoothes the way for one more very
useful process extension. I call it escalator delivery (Figure 2).
In an ideal world, management would have at hand whenever needed
highly promising concepts to be carried through detailed design
into production. With escalator delivery, this becomes a real
possibility. If the conduct of planning projects need not be
restricted to a single designated group or team, it is possible to
create a delivery system geared to any desired frequency of concept
generation.
For escalator delivery, multiple planning teams are assembled as
needed from a mix of departments expected to be involved with the
new product. Each team is led by a team member who has been through
the planning process before. Prepared and supported by Metaplanning,
each team explores its charter, develops a fully considered concept, and
then disbands with members returning to home departments.
Projects are initiated at a frequency that matches the frequency at
which new concepts are desired. Whatever the planning time allocated,
once the first project is completed, succeeding projects follow at the
desired delivery frequency. The escalator is as long as the planning
process; steps (projects) are as close together as the desired
frequency of completion. Given a sound planning process, escalator
delivery practically guarantees reliable, high-quality concepts at a
predictable rate of appearance.
The concept has additional benefits:
As teams complete their work, team members returning to their
departments become champions of the project as those most
knowledgeable about the "what's" and "why's" of its development.
In going through the planning process, those employees have also
received hands-on training in what it takes to develop a concept.
In the process of conducting the project, they have learned how
insights are transformed to ideas and integrated into workable
product concepts― preparation enabling them to continue as
active information contributors from within their departments.
If the planning process is backed with a well-structured and
formatted knowledge base, they will be able to continue to
contribute to it and help others to do the same. The suggestion
box never was so good.
The value is multiplied if the knowledge base is qualitative.
Companies and other organizations lose untold amounts of valuable
information every year through the loss of personnel to retirement,
resignation and transfer. A strong qualitative knowledge base
can preserve the "why" reasons for actions – the insights that
disappear with the departure of those knowledgeable about the actions.
A strong planning process provides the knowledge base for saving
the "why's"; escalator delivery creates a growing body of employees
with the training to know how and why to use it.
Charles L. Owen is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design,
one of the six academic units of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.
There, Mr. Owen conducts research and teaches semiannually in the MDes, MDM
and PhD Design graduate programs.
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