Business Excellence

Business Excellence Arun Kumar Davay

Business Excellence • Sensing Opportunities and Product Identification • 1. Entrepreneur as an opportunity spotter. 2. Entrepreneur as a project champion

Inventory of qualities • Bad news: The list is LONG !! • Good news: All most no single person has all of them • Team where members complement each other

Sensing Opportunities - Factors • 1. Ability to perceive and preserve basic ideas Problems: • Change • Inventions • Competition • 2.Ability to harness different sources of knowledge and information 3. Vision and creativity

Socio-Economic Perspective • Envision new product and service ideas • Change the way people live, work, and spend time • Create wealth using ethical means • Contribute to the national GDP • Generate employment • Create heroes and role models

Importance of Environment • 1. Scanning of the environment 2. Generation of ideas 3. Identification of product or service.

Environmental Factors • • • • •

Socio-Cultural Factor Political Factor Economic Factor Legal and Financial Factors Developmental and Institutional Support Factors

Product Identification • • • • • • • • • • • • •

. Idea and Opportunity Assessment Product or Service Identification Application and Use Level of Operation Cost Competition Technical Complexity Annual Turnover and Profit Margin Market Assessment Demand Supply and Nature of Competition Cost and Price of Products

The difference between invention and innovation is: • Invention - is the creation of new products, processes, and technologies not previously known to exist. • Innovation - is the transformation of creative ideas into useful applications by combining resources in new or unusual ways to provide value to society for or improved products, technology, or services.

Elements in the Innovation Process • • • •

Analytical Planning Organizing Resources Implementation Commercial Application

Product Development Phases • Idea Generation – inspiration, feel, experience, creativity • Market validation – need assessment, collate features, find gaps • Exploring alternatives – feasibility study • Freezing the specimens and features

• Choice of the architecture

Product Development Phases… • Team selection and resource allocation • Building the prototype

• Getting early customer feedback • Beta testing • Launch and subsequent support – branding, channels, distribution

Product Development – Strategic Issues • Timing is everything. • Products operate in a “competitive landscape”.

• Competing and/or substitute products are announced in the middle of the development cycle. • Set of features is a moving target – early customer feedback has to be incorporated.

Pitfalls in Product Development Management • Conflict of interest between Marketing, Development, and Finance functions – Is it healthy or vicious? • Tendency to trade “Men” for “Months” – Brooks’ Law

• Excessive emphasis on time to market or features • Excessive emphasis on time to market or quality

Some Observations about the Product Development Process • Small, autonomous, cohesive teams build great products. • Strong intra-team communication and loose inter-team coupling works best. • Documentation is not as important in product development lifecycles as in projects. • Resourcefulness works!!