Growth swamped the innovation department

Growing demand for new product variants and engineering changes swamped the innovation department of a fast-growing electronics company. Design errors only came to light in production, crash actions pushed aside projects that were on schedule, and hiring more engineers made things worse. Within six months of starting work with Axisto, output was reliable again, and time to market had been cut from 23 to 11 weeks

Duration: six months

The situation

Demand for the products was growing strongly. The company responded by broadening its sales channels, from B2B only to B2C as well. When Axisto was asked to help, that transition was still in its early stages.

Demand for new product variants, engineering changes and product modifications swamped the innovation department. Under that workload, changes were rushed through without following the proper procedures. Design errors only came to light in production, where fixing them cost a great deal of time and money. New developments were rejected because they didn’t meet customer requirements. More and more crash actions pushed aside the projects that were on schedule.

The department took on more people, but onboarding new engineers actually took time away from the experienced staff. The consequences were felt throughout the company: from missed sales opportunities and product recalls to overtime in production and innovation.

What was really wrong

The company had an excellent development process: well documented, proven, and based on Design for Six Sigma. It was tempting to assume a capacity problem, but that assumption needed testing first.

Workshops with the innovation department’s staff revealed something else. Too much product and process knowledge sat in the heads of a few very experienced developers, who as a result were involved in too many projects at once. There was too little direction from business planning, so platform development started too late and became entangled with product development projects. And there were no clear criteria for starting or rejecting projects: too many ran at once, with no clear priorities.

What we did together

Together with a team from the client, we designed an approach with four workstreams: business planning, portfolio management, project management and knowledge retention.

Calm and overview first. The number of live projects was cut by 70%. The team prioritised the remaining projects, set rules for how many projects any one person works on at a time, and used them to draw up a resource plan.

Direction from business planning With better management information, projects could now be prioritised and planned ahead. That gave the department a grip on its work and brought calm to the organisation.

Reassessed projects. High-priority projects were reviewed on their content and the resources they needed were established. Staff development was aligned accordingly.

Made knowledge available. EA system for capturing key design and engineering rules made knowledge that had sat in a few heads available to all developers. The effectiveness of the whole department increased.