The Five Forces of Change

One thing that has not changed for several decades
The truth you seek continues to be with your present and prospective customers

One of the best sales executives I have the pleasure of working with while at Mentor Graphics, Inc. is Terry Paullin, now a famous technology writer and owner of 'Front Row Cinema'. Terry taught me about the importance of understanding the truth that present and prospective customers rely on for their success. Getting to this truth will be the subject of a future post.

   Your company’s success will be the result of understanding the truth behind your present and prospective customer needs better than the competitors, developing a product and/or service to meet those needs, bringing that product and/or service to market quickly at a fair value, and most importantly — convincing the customer that your product will improve their productivity, quality and profitability better than the competition or internal choices.

   Even if you agree with this general prescription for product or services success, its ineffective without converting customer truth into a more detailed knowledge of how to use and control the five basic forces of change that affect your product and service development processes: technology, tools, tasks, talent, and time.

   Successful companies understand the interactions between the five forces of change. These companies are nimble in anticipating and adjusting the applied technologies; state-of-the-art tools; the processes and the tasks within; the training and succession planning needed; concurrently — without impacting the ever critical time-to-market.

    By not harnessing, directing, and efficiently applying any one of these forces, a company reduces its chance for success, whereas well-managed forces of change can become valued resources within a company.

   These forces of change are at work in either disturbing or stabilizing a specific company setting — the integrated product or service development environment. This integrated concurrent environment includes the concepts, technologies, tools and people necessary to design a product, manufacture it, market it, and support.  

   Still today — after several decades of evidence that Concurrent Engineering works — companies do not take the time to design in (FURPS+), functionality, usability, reliability, performance, serviceability, manufacturability, testability, recyclability or even acceptable quality. Even from a distance one can see that these companies either do not understand the need or are afraid of the concentrated effort required for integrated concurrent environment processes that manage and react quickly to the five forces of change.

   Well-informed companies know that by directing these forces of change toward combining customer truths with new technologies and integrated concurrent productive processes, their managers will be able to make the decisions that translate into a company’s continuing survival and, better yet, growth.

   One might wonder how some companies (that are pains in our backsides) can continue to compete — they compete by cutting out, stripping down, marginal quality, deceptive warranties, lack of proper people training, and lowest price offerings. There might still be a market for these products or service offerings – just not the market for you or your customers. Besides many of their customers will eventually become your customer – why – because you are part of the truth!

   So, consider these questions about how your company views and works with the five forces of change.

Technology. How successfully does your company take advantage of those technologies that are currently available? Are you a technology leader in your marketplace? Are the product interfaces built on industry standards? Do you have a long range vision for your product or service offering that will guide the technology you use and develop? Are you inventing and developing technologies internally that will provide product or service leadership?

Tools. What are the best tools to use? What level of automation is required? What level of compatibility and integration is required? How well is your company managing the impact of new tools on your employees and their tasks? Are you actively working with other industry leaders and associations to standardize tool interfaces? What data is required by the tools and how will that data be managed? Do you have training and succession plans in place?

Tasks. How are you getting to the truth and translating it into best practices? How are tasks defined, then divided up, and managed effectively — especially as they increase in complexity? Is the task within a process continually improved upon to achieve increasing levels of quality and productivity? Who is managing the interactions between the five forces of change? Would the automation of tasks increase your efficiency? Do you design in FURPS+ to your product and service offerings?

Talent. How does your company get talented employees to work effectively; and of greater concern, how do you ensure a long-term supply of talent? Do you provide interesting and challenging jobs with continuing training and education? Do managers help to keep employees satisfied and empower them by relinquishing authority? Do leaders and managers understand and communicate the company's vision? The same way? Do you have training and succession plans in place? Do you have metrics and review processes in place for your talent? Do you have a shelved or living employee handbook? Is your talent conscientiously competent or conscientiously incompetent? The former works for you the later works against you — creating productivity killing hidden parallel processes.

Time. How does your company shorten product time-to-market? through technology? through tools? through processes? and/or through talent? Or something else? How do you quickly introduce product or service improvements? What are the metrics for improving the technology? The tools? The tasks/processes? The talent? and products and service offerings? How often are these metrics reviewed and acted upon?

   Some aspects of these five forces can be managed by the strategy and organization within the product development and service environment. Other aspects are managed by your company’s interaction with the resources outside this environment. And work with one of these forces affects what you do with another, for example, decisions about technologies impact the tools you use. The tools you use may shorten the time-to-market. The way tasks are structured can affect how well you use the talent in your work force. How much time it takes to do a task can impact follow-on tool or talent productivity. Polished dynamic processes and workforce will impact time-to-market with a quality product or service offering at a fair value.

   So the main thing to remember is that these forces not only exist in parallel, side by side, but also are fully integrated vertically and horizontally in the product development and service environment. They are part of the living corporate fabric that is being continually woven and re-patterned so that a company can compete successfully. And the first thing to do is to understand these five forces of change so that by creative and effective management they can become valued resources — by you — and your customers.

Please take time to read - Concurrent Engineering, The Product Development Environment.