Product Development and Management Benchmarking

Benchmarking or comparison of your processes, methods and tools for product development, product management and other aspects of product life cycle management can provide a very powerful and practical way to identify improvements in time to market and other factors.

The term ‘Benchmarking’ is used in several ways within the business community. Time to Market’s approach from a Product and Service viewpoint is based on benchmarking as a method to stimulate and implement improvement using external information and examples.

Time to Market are experienced in the approaches described in here

A definition of Time to Market Benchmark from a measurement perspective:

“A comparison of Time to Market measures (QCT) between companies to identify gaps in performance (to drive improvement)”

Requires:

• Common definitions of measures

• Common definitions of products/projects

• Historical vs current?

• Average or ranges?

• Apples and apples?

A definition from an improvement perspective:

“A systematic approach to improvement of Product Development/Management and Time to Market where best practice (in processes, methods, tools or other areas of business) is sought and appropriately implemented to achieve benchmark performance or beyond ”

In practice a combination of the two works well

Types of Benchmarking

• Healthcheck or  Audit
  3rd Party assessment of TtM Practice and performance

• Formal Networking
  Forums for cross-company sharing of Practice and Performance

• Informal Networking
  Informal discussion; Web bulletin boards

• Explicit Information Gathering
  'Research' and 'Report'

• Participative Knowledge Gathering
  Involvement of client in visits and knowledge gathering

• Group Knowledge Sharing
  Knowledge gathering involving a group of companies
   

Follow the arrow for more information on how to go about benchmarking