Reforming the Development Process

Recognition of the importance of innovation and, consequently, design and design planning has led to greatly expanded research in the methods of design and planning. This in turn has resulted in fast evolving planning techniques and a need for a higher level planning function in the development process—metaplanning. Metaplanning is the planning of the planning process, an activity that involves customizing planning and design processes from the newly available tools, training planners to use them, and launching advanced planning teams armed with them to develop systemicly conceived concepts for evaluation, approval and detailed design A spinoff of the extended development process, Escalator Delivery, makes feasible a parallel process for producing and delivering concepts at a rate appropriate for the needs of a highly competitive market. Advantages of this approach beyond the primary benefit of predictable, timely delivery include greater communication within the organization and a richer knowledge production and maintenance system actively growing throughout departments. 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.