Eight Months Early and 20% Under Budget

A medical device manufacturer had a consistent track record—new product development projects for their most complicated product line took thirty months on average to complete. Fortunately, senior management knew the strategic value of developing new products more quickly. So they set a goal to finish their next one in eighteen months.

The vice president of R&D had just read Don Reinertsen’s Managing the Design Factory and was interested in implementing the principles, so he hired the founders of Playbook to help. After a thorough root cause assessment to determine what was causing the project delays, they customized eight different methods from Lean, Agile, and Critical Chain. 

However, there was one major problem.

There was already a major design project that was very late and was consuming most of the critical team members. In order to start the new project, they were going to have to rely on a new hire in the critical mechanical engineering role and use a part-time project manager from Marketing that had never managed a full NPD project before.

It turned out those additional challenges didn't matter.

"Cutting the project time by 50% is not something you can just sort of ignore."

                                                                –VP R&D

The project was completed in twelve months—eight months faster than their goal, and eighteen months faster than their average. This was in spite of the fact that it was the second most important project in the company at the time. 

An additional benefit to being early was the project came in 20% under budget—as opposed to their typical 200%-300% over budget. As the R&D VP said, “Not only do you have the revenue increase potential at the end, but we’ve actually spent less money.”

Watch this video to hear the President, VP R&D, and VP Marketing tell the story.